Intel Xeon 5300 series review

This is a genuine shift in the workstation arena. The only place you'd have found eight processors up until now would have been in a server farm, where applications easily lend themselves to coarse multithreading. The rapid shift from two cores to eight has caught many application developers on the hop, and you should confirm before you commit to a system like this that your primary application can use all eight cores, or plans to in the near future.

As with the Core 2 parts, the price of the Xeon DPs is remarkably low, and in the right circumstances a fully kitted-out DP system is blindingly fast. But the fact remains that while the 65nm Core 2 process is superb for dual-core parts, it will take the 45nm Penryn architecture with its reduced power consumption, plus more movement on the software front, to bring the age of quad-core DP to maturity.

Author: David Fearon