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WHAT IMPRESSED engineers most about the top two performers, which were products from IBM Corp. and network appliance start-up Netier Inc., was not only that they outpaced the competition by three to five times, but that performance was on a par with a stand-alone Celeron 333MHz computer running the same workload. Also surprising was that some of the technology's earliest pioneers were at the bottom of the performance charts.
Putting on nearly identical shows, the two chart toppers represented each thin-client category. The IBM Network Station 1000 is a RISC-based network computer (NC), and the Netier NetXpress SL2000 is a Windows-based terminal (WBT) using a Socket 7 processor. Although these devices contain more powerful microprocessors than others reviewed and are therefore capable of local processing, it was superior video circuitry that was responsible for the top scores.
The graphics-intensive performance benchmarks used by engineers...