I'm wondering if somebody could lay down a simple outline of the differences between the current Pentium 4 branch and Xeon processors. I'd don't want a link to a whitepaper, nor statements of opinion. To better understand what information I'm trying to gather, here's my reason for asking:
I'm coming to the point of being in the market for a new desktop processor/motherboard combo. I'm definately a power user (despite lacking much knowledge about Xeon chips), and I'm looking for the most bang for my buck. I'm fairly well aquainted already with the current Pentium 4 & AMD chips, but I'm not very familiar with either company's server focused offerings. The thing that made me curious is the new Pentium 4 EE. As I'm sure you know, the price of this particular chip is going to be extremely high. While browsing PriceWatch today, I came to the conclusion that for roughly the same price as a P4EE, you could slap together dual Xeon 2.8 chips with a mobo. This seems very odd to me, as to why anyone would invest in a P4EE when for the same cash they could be running dual server quality chips with much more brute force and dual processing to boot. Clearly, either there's aspects to the Xeon chip that demote from it's ability to perform in a desktop/workstation environment, or Intel is hoping to sucker lots of power users.
That said, I'm looking for a summary of how the two chips match up technically, and hopefully this will also explain why the P4EE would be worth what's being asked for it. As an aside, I'll also accept recommendations for the best power desktop chips available, but that's not what I'm putting the points towards here.
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