OSNews

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia put Intel's new Nehalem to the test and found the technology a "game-changing development". Using an HP ProLiant DL580 with four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core as a baseline, Venezia's Nehalem system - which ran two quad-core Intel Xeon W5580 CPUs at 3.2GHz per core with HyperThreading enabled - performed roughly 60 percent faster across a battery of tests, including gzip compression, WAV-to-MP3 encoding, MPEG-4 to Flash Video conversion, and mysql-bench. Even more impressive, Venezia found, was that the Nehalem system did all that while serving double-duty as his workstation. "At the same time the Nehalem was executing my battery of tests, it was driving a 30-inch and a 24-inch monitor off an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500, playing an MPEG movie in full-screen on the 30-inch monitor, and running more than 500 processes across four virtual desktops, including dozens of terminal sessions, Firefox browser sessions, Java applications, and streaming audio â€" and it still put up these numbers."