Building a workstation - need CPU advice

[ND93]

I'm interested in building a workstation. Will be running floating-point intensive applications (performing large matrix operations). Don't know a lot about CPU performance. Would Intel Xeon chips be of advantage? Would, say a 450MHz PII Xeon chip outperform a standard PIII 500 or 550MHz chip on these applications? If so, how much L2 cache would it take? What about dual processors? Assuming I have an OS supporting two processors, can I expect performance improvements, and if so, in what way do dual processors work together on the same "problem" or do they work separately on different tasks? Where should I put my money? Just looking for some advice on cost/performance trade-offs.

[Zonker]

Dual processors will give you alot help if the application was written to support them.

I'm not sure Xeons will give you that much peroformance gain over PII's or even Celerons at the same clock speed, when we're discussing only floating point performance.