Power manifests itself in a variety of forms. For some, it may be an intangible, confidence, social status or perceived success. Others may view power as a material possession in the form of wealth, property or a sports car. In the computer industry, however, power is measured in quantities of performance; the ability to savagely tear through complex mathematical formulas and efficiently processes gargantuan databases.

Two years ago, it would have been difficult to foretell the battle between Intel and AMD that is currently raging. In this industry, however, two years is a veritable lifetime, and we are now faced with Intel’s Pentium 4 facing off against AMD’s Athlon. Both architectures provide strengths and weaknesses that have already been exposed to exhaustive analysis. However, both designs have lacked a feature commonly sought after in high-end workstations and servers: multiprocessing. Later this month, Intel will unveil their dual-processor iteration of the Pentium 4, which they have simply dubbed Xeon DP and was formerly referred to by the code name Foster.