"Each CPU has its advantages and disadvantages that are quite apparent. The Athlon has a major disadvantage in the area of memory bandwidth, but its IPC is high. The P4 has a weak IPC, but it makes up for that with a much higher MHz and excellent memory bandwidth. The Opteron has the good IPC, but the lowest clock of all the CPUs. It does however have double the L2 cache, and improves to memory bandwidth to be on par with the P4. Since the Opteron is primarily being aimed at servers the clock disadvantage is not as important as on the desktop where the Athlon and P4 reside. In workstations where the nForce 3 Pro was designed for MHz becomes more of a factor.
The nForce 3 Professional is an excellent implementation of an Opteron workstation chipset, and performance is definitely impressive. The only thing lacking at the moment is more MHz from the Opteron which hopefully we will be seeing on August 4th with a release of a 2GHz 246 model. With no faster Athlons or P4's in the pipe till quarter 4 a 246 Opteron could very well take an overall CPU crown on the workstation."
