Xeon as a worthwhile platform?

[Torbjorn Granlund]

Recent Xeons are just Pentium 4 in bigger clothes.
The speed should be exactly the same for these cores.

(Older Xeons were Pentium 2 or Pentium 3 based.)

You should probably get Athlon systems for now.  All Pentium
4 cores to date have a glitch in the Write Combine (WC)
buffers that make them relatively slow for GMP.

(Later this year, there will be improved Pentium 4
processors that supposedly fixes the WC bugs.  But the
upcoming Opteron/Athlon 64 will almost certainly outperform
the new Pentium 4.)

-- 
Torbjörn