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We tested the performance of these systems by timing how long it takes the Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) software to encrypt a file containing approximately 200MB of data. GPG is available for a wide range of operating systems, including Windows and Linux, and is a good test of processor performance because the encryption workload is governed primarily by a processor's ability to perform integer computations, and its ability to move data between memory and the CPU. Disk performance also affects the results, but to a lesser extent. The performance of the graphics adapter should not affect the results.

The GPG software does not use more than one processor in any system, so it can be used to compare the performance of processors even when the systems under test are fitted with different numbers of processors.

We prepared the Xeon EM64T 3.6GHz system for testing by installing two versions of Suse Linux 9.1. One version was optimised for traditional x86 chips, and the other optimised to use the new 64bit extensions that feature in the Xeon EM64T and Opteron chips. The Xeon EM64T system tested was a Supermicro SS7044A-82Rl, which is a dual processor mini tower design. Our unit was fitted with a single Ultra320 SCSI disk and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. As well as supporting the new 64bit extended x86 mode first introduced by AMD, the EM64T chip is the first workstation chip from Intel to include the 800MHz 64bit front side bus. Given that the Itanium 2 currently uses a 400MHz 128bit front side bus, there is no significant difference in the memory bandwidth provided by either architecture.

The results presented for the EM64T system were recorded with HyperThreading enabled because this is the configuration recommended by Intel. Neither the Itanium nor the Opteron support HyperThreading, so we also tested this system without HyperThreading and found no significant difference between the two sets of results.

Please note that the version of this graph published in IT Week's print edition, 26 July 2004, gives an inaccurately poor result for the Itanium 2.