The new Northwood 2.2gHz 0.13-micron P4, as I mentioned earlier, seems made for Windows-XP. It's got special chipset drivers; it's got an 'application accelerator'; it's got Rambus working overtime.
For Linux it's got nothing special to offer -- no accelerators or drivers. Just 2.2 in clock speed and a memory controller that exploits RDRAM nicely, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at. But it's got that on Windows as well.
So imagine my surprise when I benchmarked it with the only test I know that crosses the great divide between Linux and Windows -- the Quake-3 FPS benchmark -- and found that the performance of this Windows-loving kit was considerably better on Linux, at least in that context.
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