Peter, you've got a great program, and I'm having a fun time using it, and exploring all of the features. You've packed a huge number of features in BiaB and Real Band, and many of these are challenging my musical knowledge. On the threading, all of these features show up as generally about 20 active threads (it varies from 10 to 30 or so) at any one time. I think the only time a programmer would really try to intervene is when you know a subroutine is going to be a resource hog, so you try to give it priority and its own core (or 'hyperthread' = fake core) or memory until if finishes. I generally am scared of second guessing the compiler or operating system. It's not so much that you can't do better, but the odds are stacked towards you getting in completely wrong.

Jazzmammal, I think there is some real street cred in recycling your old cases -- I take pride in the fact that I didn't even buy this case; it was given to me by a friend who had already used it for a few years. I'm going to see how long I can keep it on the road.

Jeff, I had seen the write-up on the AMD 6-cores (Thuban was their internal code name) which have L1/L2/L3 cache and DDR3. The two core Phenom II uses the same cores (the K10 cores) and basically salvages rejects from the 4 core chips (chip harvesting) with two cores disabled. Because of this, you get a real discount ~$85 wo fan. And you get that same 6mb L3 cache shared by two rather than six cores, which should help predictive execution for a single program (but who knows). And they all clock at 3-4Mhz.

But I think just as important is the memory access -- I'm guessing that RT/RB are really memory intensive; probably the sequencing part as well. On my monitor, BiaB is the biggest memory consumer (around 200 MB out of 2GB or 10%) of the active programs besides the system. And I suspect the read/write activity is pretty high. So having DDR3 (twice the transfer rate of DDR2) and a 64-bit fetch (which you can have on Win7 and Mac) is perhaps just as important as cores. And I like to have a lot of onboard memory (at least 4GB) so the disk can page into the memory.