Why are so many people running Quads? I thought Winbloze and winapps didn't exploit even two processors very well.
That's a myth. Maybe created by some overzealous Linux or Apple fanboy, but given a halfway decent operating system (read: Linux, OS X, Windows, BSD flavours), SMP performance gain relies entirely on the user. If you're doing single-threaded stuff all day long, you won't profit from a quad over a dualcore (you won't even profit much from a dualcore). If, however, you like to use dozens of programs more or less simultaneously, more CPU power (and, almost more importantly, more CPUs, be they virtual (HTT) or physical) can't hurt. It's only in special situations when performance will only be used for a single program (i.e. rendering, processing data etc.) where program architecture and requirement should be taken into consideration. For rendering, which can be broken into parts quite easily, more CPUs with less clock speed are typically better than less CPUs with higher clock speed. For data processing applications, which often can't multi-thread due to algorithms used, you're best adviced to get the fastest CPU you can find, cores don't matter.
For everyday work, I'd buy a quad. More often than not, it's not sheer performance that counts, but rather smoothness. Take Intel's Atom, for example. The Atom is painfully slow (low clock speed, and the in-order architecture doesn't exactly contribute to high performance), but feels quite nice nonetheless, even better than a non-SMT/SMP CPU of slightly higher clock frequency. Why? One word: HTT.
Performance, however, is still worse than our imaginary reference CPU, but it will feel better for everyday work and not painfully slow at all.
-huha
