Because four is better than two
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Fortunately, both AMD and Intel seem to have settled on an answer that should allow them to take advantage of ballooning transistor counts to gain additional performance: thread-level parallelism. By dialing back clock speeds and putting multiple CPU cores on a chip, the theory goes, processor performance can rise as transistor counts do. This sort of parallelism will, of course, be familiar to those who know a thing or two about Opteron processors, which have commonly been employed in pairs as part of server or workstation systems.
We've had a pair of dual-core Opteron processors on the test bench for some time now, and we're pleased to report some rather impressive results. AMD's dual-core design is something more than just a pair of CPUs glued together on a single piece of silicon, and this design choice yields a performance dividend. Keep reading to see how the new Opteron 275 stacks up against its Opteron predecessors and against Intel's latest "Nocona" Xeons. We also have a head-to-head battle of single-socket, dual-core workstation processors: the Opteron 175 versus the Pentium Extreme Edition 840.
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