Originally posted by: Harabecw
Does anyone else find the Opteron unimpressive? its quite good if you compare it to today's CPU's but what about the Prescott?
Will the Athlon 64 have about the same performance?
So do you want to compare the Prescott to the Opteron or the Athlon 64? They're not the same thing... the Opteron has buttloads of extra crap on it to accomodate multi-processor rigs and if I'm not mistaken, will have up to 2 MB of on die cache.
Comparing the Prescott to an Opteron is the same as comparing a P4 to an Athlon MP. The Opteron and Athlon MP are both server level processors, while as far as I know, the Prescott is another P4 designed for desktop use.
As Swanny said... it's hard to compare processors that don't exist today.
If you'd like a rough estimate of what the Athlon 64 will be capable of... read
this article by AnandTech... it probably has the most relevant information to your question, desktop performance rather than server performance.