The Nocona is a Prescott Xeon. It can thus be expected to perform in a manner similar to the Prescott on 32-bit benchmarks. And it does.
These were only 32-bit benchmarks, albeit in a 64-bit OS. The Flash mpeg import is even single threaded.
The interesting question is if it will scale as poorly as current Xeons. Yes, indeed, it does. No improvement at all there.
The important and interesting benchmarks are a complete disaster for the Nocona in this review.
The result on the other 32-bit application benchmarks, are exactly as expected, or slightly worse. If there is any remarkable observation at all to do, it is that the dual Opteron beats the Nocona, on some of these highly Intel 32-bit optimized media encodings.
With the sole exception that these tests ran under WindowsXP64, this review doesn't differ from previous Xeon vs Opteron comparisions. Nor does it provide any unexpected results.
In light of this, I find the positive tone of the review, like in "The Final Word", very remarkable?!
And frankly, I can't see that Intel have done anything at all, besides supporting 64-bit which is great of course, to readdress the lack of competitive edge in the Xeons. The selection of benchmarks used in the review... - Who the hell purchases a 2-way 64-bit system to do single threaded 32-bit media encoding?