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While we were busy testing the workstations in our main review, Xi Computer called and made us an offer we couldn't refuse: Would we care to look at two identically configured systems, one with a 450MHz Pentium II and the other sporting a 450MHz Pentium II Xeon-Intel's newest processor, hot off the assembly line? We couldn't pass up a chance to get a direct comparison between the two processors, with all other things being equal.
What's a Xeon?
In a nutshell, the Pentium II Xeon is a Pentium II chip with a redesigned L2 cache and support for four-way multiprocessing. Using special (not to mention costly) SRAM chips produced by Intel, the L2 cache runs at the full processor speed-not half-speed as with previous Pentium Ils. Also, the Xeon supports a larger L2 cache: 512KB, MB, and eventually...