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More are. Most aren't.

Actually, most Windows programs are multithreaded, otherwise the UI would freeze up anytime you told it to do something, like check mail or render a web page.

Why are you talking about servers in response to a quoted question that says non-servers?

I'm talking about a development desktop.

Assuming that the application you're running will generate sufficient cache hits. For some applications this performance gain is minimal.

Now you're talking the minority.

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.

I'm sure that is true. A single-threaded application that crunches small chunks of data in a 2K window would probably fit that. To make it true you have to keep as much as possible on the CPU, getting most of your data and instructions from the cache. Thus more cores, more cache and a faster bus wouldn't matter much.

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.

Horses for courses as always. Blanket statements in computers usually don't work well. I do simple video editing, barely amateur, and video conversion in backing up the DVDs before the kids can destroy them. I wish I had that 8-core monster, as my little $23 shareware video converter can use them. It would also be nice to run Windows in a VM and give it two cores while leaving two for the host OS.

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.

Having a lot of fast RAM should help a bit due to the operating system's disk cache. It would be cool to set up a system to compile off a RAM disk. When converting video the hard drive just blips every few seconds.

Actually, most Windows programs are multithreaded, otherwise the UI would freeze up anytime you told it to do something, like check mail or render a web page.

A Windows application programmer is not forking off a thread for the UI. He or she is programming to the Windows SDK and the OS is doing that thread. Just because the CPU is timeslicing between different threads does not mean an application is multithreaded. The CPU required to do UI is relatively minimal; as a Mac proponent, you ought to know that alot of this can be offloaded to the GPU now with business like QuartzExtreme.
Don't get me wrong, it would be *nice* to have 8 cores for my dev machine. But I think the practical gains are minimal. Maybe you run everything on your Dev box, but I don't. Right now, I have like 8 terminal sessions, JBoss, Eclipse, Thunderbird, Firefox, SQuirreL (a SQL editor) and VMWare, all running. This Core 2 DUO takes it like a champ. I would probably only see a real speedup with an 8 core if I wasn't connecting to a remote DB.

It would be nice if I could have my application server sitting totally in RAMDisk land. I'd need more than 4GB of RAM though. I think I can cram 8GB in here, but last time I checked, the 2GB modules were still expensive.