Digit Magazine pitted Intel’s new Xeon, previously codenamed ‘Woodcrest’ and based on the same chip technology behind the company’s Core Duo processors, against AMD’s newly launched Opteron processors. Intel’s new Xeon’s are also the chips used by Apple’s first Intel-based workstation, the Mac Pro.

“The results show that Intel has reclaimed its crown in a majestical fashion. The Xeon 5150s were 35 per cent faster in Maya software renderer and 16 per cent faster in mental ray than the Opteron 2218s. Intel’s chips also gave an 18 per cent boost to Photoshop over AMD’s rival,” Neil Bennett reports for Digit.

Bennett reports, “The performance over the Power PC G5s was equally impressive. The 5150’s Maya software rendering time was a whopping 90 per cent faster, and its mental ray score was 32 per cent faster. It was also 27 per cent faster in Photoshop – though this is not something you could translate to the new Mac Pros as an Intel-native version of Photoshop is still at least six months away.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple flies aboard Secretariat, while Dell plans to hop on a nag headed for the glue factory. Who’s the Chief Processor Picker for Dell and what, if any, were his criteria exactly, besides their usual “lowest price, performance be damned?”

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Apple chose well: Anandtech – Intel Core 2 Duo ‘the fastest desktop processor we’ve ever tested’ – July 14, 2006
Report: Dell signs deal with AMD for millions of chips for full range of desktops, notebooks – June 26, 2006
Apple chose well: Intel poised to take massive lead across the board over AMD – June 07, 2006
Dell opts for AMD’s Opteron; deal confined to servers at this point – May 18, 2006