Intel Goes Inside the Workstation With the Powerful New Xeon Chip

Not too long ago, workstation might as well have been a synonym for UNIX. The typical unit was an expensive black box that only the geekiest nerd would consider owning. But not anymore. Intel's new Pentium II Xeon chip--in tandem with Microsoft's NT operating system--brings ultra-high-end performance within reach of small businesses, work-at-home professionals, and large offices that need to buy many powerful systems.

These days, $7000 will buy you a workstation robustly configured with a pair of 400-MHz Pentium II Xeons and a high-end graphics card. With this ordnance in hand, you'll be able to attack Photoshop or mechanical design jobs that would slow a conventional PC to a crawl--or force you to buy an expensive UNIX box from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics. If you design Web pages for a living, create interactive presentations, or work with massive quantities of financial data, one of these Xeons could be the solution you've been looking for.

Dell and Hewlett-Packard already market Xeon workstations, and within just a few months you can expect to see similar offerings from other vendors, including Compaq, IBM, and Intergraph. Prices for dual-processor Xeon systems range from $5000 for machines with 512KB of secondary cache to more than $12,000 for systems with 1MB of secondary cache and a high-end graphics card.

Not everyone needs a dual-processor workstation, however. Even if you can afford the freight, buying a Xeon workstation to run standard office applications is an invitation to disappointment. In fact, a $6824 256MB Dell Precision 610 workstation with two Xeon-400 CPUs (with 512KB of secondary cache each) did no better on PC WorldBench 98--which tests performance on conventional business applications--than a $2220 64MB PII-400 Dell OptiPlex GXi. When we tested the systems with demanding workstation apps like AutoCad and LightWave, however, the workstation clearly outclassed the PC.