cannot comment on AMD, as his macs willy-nilly use intel processors...

can comment that the new box's "Nehalem" quad core xeon 3500 pulls much less power than his last (earlier) xeon box

also opines that 8 cores is overdoing it, so he only has 4

it appears one can now get 64-bit support in the more reasonably priced core 2 line

if that's true---64-bit core 2s---there'd be little point in a user-desktop w/Xeons like i have, as the Xeons don't so much do stuff faster

ia64 has been around a long while, as has amd64. I'm looking at a 4-core Phenom II

is this a comparison between a phenom system something like you mean, and an intel one?

yup

no strong opinion on that one.