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#1: Having 8 CPUs does not make you eight times faster than someone with one. How multi-threaded does a non-server need to be?

1) More and more programs are becoming multithreaded. Even the small shareware video apps on Mac will use any processors you have.

2) Running development instances of application servers can really use multiple cores. VMWare gives each instance the option of how many cores it wants to use.

3) It can help even a single-threaded application. Accessing some OS X libraries, for example Core Animation, automatically spawns another thread even if the application doesn't know about it.

4) The cache is the key to the high performance of the Intel Core line. A Core 2 Duo normally comes with 4 MB L2 cache. The Xeon line in the Mac Pro comes with 12 MB L2 cache, 6 MB per pair of cores, 50% more cache. Even on a per-core basis it should be faster.

5) Xeons also tend to run on a faster bus.

6) However, they may be slower for certain latency-intensive benchmarks. This is because of the FB-DIMM memory modules have a much higher bandwidth at the expense of latency.

1) More and more programs are becoming multithreaded. Even the small shareware video apps on Mac will use any processors you have.
More are. Most aren't.
2) Running development instances of application servers can really use multiple cores. VMWare gives each instance the option of how many cores it wants to use.
Why are you talking about servers in response to a quoted question that says non-servers?

3) It can help even a single-threaded application. Accessing some OS X libraries, for example Core Animation, automatically spawns another thread even if the application doesn't know about it. 4) The cache is the key to the high performance of the Intel Core line. A Core 2 Duo normally comes with 4 MB L2 cache. The Xeon line in the Mac Pro comes with 12 MB L2 cache, 6 MB per pair of cores, 50% more cache. Even on a per-core basis it should be faster.
Assuming that the application you're running will generate sufficient cache hits. For some applications this performance gain is minimal.

Look, I'm not even sure what's being argued here. I'm certainly not saying that Xeons are slow. I'm just saying that in many applications, a system with with a slightly faster dual core will beat out a quad core or two quad cores. And I'm certainly not saying that these aren't beautiful machines. But I certainly don't think it's at all reasonable to say they compete in the 'bang for the buck' region in purely terms of hardware. And please, remember that I was talking most specifically about me, some joker who overclocks. For what the VAST majority of people do, even the baseline Core 2 systems are more than enough juice. You know, I do a compile of a huge application and it's not the compile that takes most of the time, it's the build I/O.