AMD 760MP & Athlon MP - Dual Processor Heaven

Workstation Performance

The next aspect of performance to look at is workstation performance in CAD, imaging and development software. For this we used Ziff Davis Media's Dual Processor Inspection tests which run through three applications that can take advantage of multiple processors: Microstation SE, Photoshop 4, and Visual C++ 6.

Microstation SE is a CAD/Design package that is very stressful when it comes to x87 FPU calculations. This area is where the Athlon has clearly excelled in and the benchmarks definitely prove it. Even the Dual Duron 850 is able to give the Dual Xeon 1.7 a run for its money.

Running applications with a good deal of legacy x87 code will prove to perform well on a Pentium III, even better on an Athlon and extremely well on a DP Athlon system. The performance here speaks for itself.

The Photoshop 4.0 test is the only one we have run into thus far where the Dual Xeon is able to outperform the Dual Athlon MP setup. Here the performance advantage is a noticeable 12% in favor of the Dual Xeon.

Visual C++ itself won't split up the compiling process into multiple threads however this particular test compiles two separate programs simultaneously which definitely illustrates a situation in which having multiple processors can come in handy. Here the Athlon MP regains its performance lead over its biggest competitor with a respectable 14% performance gap.

The overall workstation performance crown obviously goes to the Dual Athlon MP, you've already seen the benchmarks that make up these impressive results.