> So far, I've stressed numerous times that I am considering
> this from a consumer point of view.
From the consumer's point of view, are they going to be able
to run Word and Excel faster? Perhaps some MT games, yes. And
perhaps some MT rendering programs. But the vast majority of
programs aren't MT and I've explained many times why this is
so. And there are programs out there that will have problems
with DC out of the box.
> I don't know about that, but I see Core Duo beating the
> dual CPU G5 systems. The quad core ones are a low volume
> niche, and the performance here has more to do with
> multiple cores as opposed to 64-bits.
It depends on what you are doing. A lot of Apple software takes
advantage of the hardware pretty closely as it really needs to.
My guess on the Quad Core systems are that they are professional systems and I don't know that they really are
low-volume. I work with someone that has two high-end
PowerMac G5s and he uses them for engineering. Not really
a target market for Apple but Mac/OSX is surprisingly good
for development.
Edit: the 16 GB option is available on the low-end PowerMacs as
well. Even the previous generation PowerMacs could be had with
8 GB of memory. I think that mine is limited to 4 or 6 GB.