Pentium 4 HT vs. Pentium Xeon?

I'm in the process of purchasing a new computer and I couldn't decide
whether I should buy a p4HT or a Xeon. I am not an expert in hardware
so I appreciate any help.

I will use this computer mostly as a workstation for 3D graphics
applications.

From my research I understand that Xeon was the only intel processor
that had hyper-treading capability until P4HT came out. Now I don't
see much difference, other than price. Actually I tend to think that
p4HT is superior since they have same size cache and p4ht has a 800Mhz
front side bus compared to 533Mhz in Xeon.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Ilker

On 8 Jul 2003 13:49:48 -0700, (Ilker Tarkan) wrote:

I'm in the process of purchasing a new computer and I couldn't decide
whether I should buy a p4HT or a Xeon. I am not an expert in hardware
so I appreciate any help.

I will use this computer mostly as a workstation for 3D graphics
applications.

From my research I understand that Xeon was the only intel processor
that had hyper-treading capability until P4HT came out. Now I don't
see much difference, other than price. Actually I tend to think that
p4HT is superior since they have same size cache and p4ht has a 800Mhz
front side bus compared to 533Mhz in Xeon.

Am I missing something?

Well, yeah, you picked on the lowest member of the P4 Xeon family (Prestonia
aka "Xeon with 512KB L2 Cache"). But there's also a 2.8ghz Gallatin model with
the 2MB *L3* cache in the same family...

otoh, you don't even want to know how much one of those costs ;-)

/daytripper (stick with the desktop processor)

Ilker Tarkan wrote:
I'm in the process of purchasing a new computer and I couldn't decide
whether I should buy a p4HT or a Xeon. I am not an expert in hardware
so I appreciate any help.

I will use this computer mostly as a workstation for 3D graphics
applications.

From my research I understand that Xeon was the only intel processor
that had hyper-treading capability until P4HT came out. Now I don't
see much difference, other than price. Actually I tend to think that
p4HT is superior since they have same size cache and p4ht has a 800Mhz
front side bus compared to 533Mhz in Xeon.

Am I missing something?

Of course you are. Xeon and P4 are the same thing, but Xeon has two
things going for it. First, it can be run in multiprocessor systems out
of the box, Pentium 4 cannot. Second, Xeon MP (the 4 way multiprocessor
chip) comes in large cache varieties which makes a huge performance
improvement on some applications. In the old days enthusiasts with
technical tasks like yours would buy a 2P system (thus guiding them
towards what today is Xeon), but with HT availible this isn't as
compelling a reason.

Alex
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