i agree that increases in speed have an obvious and substantial impact on performance, however the software can render those advances meaningless or worse depending on The degree of processor affinity of a given program, and it's dispatchable threads, cache etc.

i am a little curious as to how dual core will fair, and dual socket housing dual cored CPU's on a priceerformance evaluation.

regarding dual cores, i am curious as to MS licensing. would a dual socket with dual core CPU's require a 4 CPU license? guess time will tell.