Among the CPUs currently produced by Intel, Pentium 4 and celon are PC oriented, while Xeon, XeonMP, and Itanium are for workstations and servers. Among them, Itanium is a 64-bit CPU that is completely different from other CPUs. It is not designed for use in existing Windows applications. Although other processors differ in the highest operating frequency, FSB (Front-End bus frequency), and cache capacity, the internal design is basically the same, while ensuring software compatibility. The biggest difference between Pentium 4 and Xeon is that Xeon can build a multi-processor system, not P4. Only one CPU can be used in the P4 system. Xeon can use two CPUs to form a dual-processor system, and XeonMP can build a system with more than four CPUs.
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A multi-processor system can be used for applications with high processing speed that cannot be achieved by a single processor, such as 3D Graphics Production and animation file encoding. It can also be used for applications with high load and high speed, such as database processing on servers. In addition, P4 is packaged in a 478-pin package, Xeon is packaged in a 604-pin package, and the chipset supporting them is also different, so they cannot be used interchangeably.
AMD also produces Athlon MP processors for workstations and servers. Its internal design is basically the same as that of Athlon XP, But it supports dual CPU. In addition, the US Sun Company's UltraSPARC and IBM's Power and other CPUs are also server-oriented and can form a multi-processor system CPU, however, they are not compatible with Intel and AMD CPUs in both software and hardware.