Conclusion
On my way of trying to find a sensible benchmark that can show the advantage of Xeon over Pentium II I came across a lot of surprising occurrences. Running Quake 2 under NT in a dual Pentium II or Xeon system shows that you can run a file compression whilst playing Quake 2 online without ANY performance impact. Viewperf was also completely unimpressed by running in parallel with Winzip or the AVI-video, the scores stayed the same. I am running my own system with a dual PII 400 under NT and to the question why dual I always answer 'because I can record a CD and play Quake2 at the same time'. It is true, the main reason for a dual CPU system should be the usage of multi-threaded software. However, you can benefit from it even with single threaded software, in case you should have the strange habit of running several power hungry applications at the same time. Don't forget to put enough RAM into the system though!
Unfortunately I cannot offer you any server or workstation benchmarks yet. The setup for a decent server benchmark is scaringly big and I'm still waiting for the workstation software. I personally look forward to the Xeon benchmarking and evaluation of c't Magazine that will be available by this weekend. Andreas Stiller is still 'THE MAN' when it comes to CPU evaluations. I hope that I can at least put up a link to an article at the c't website. PC Professional's gem Kai Schmerer has the chance of using their big server lab, so that I'm looking forward to his evaluation as well. For now we have to go with Intel's own performance evaluations , but from what I see and hear the results are the same as seen outside of Intel.
