Haven't made the move myself, but my understanding is that dual core will help, as the rest of system, including the OS can run on 1 core while render is taking nearly 100% of the other. HT is becoming discredited with findings that almost all, not just many, applications run slower with HT on than off. That's not to say that at a given instance you can't get faster response, but if you had the wall clock time available doing each task one after the other would be more efficient in total CPU time, than using HT to do both in parallel. Poser will not be able to take advantage of HT or dual core internally - it's base code is just too old - by at least a decade! AMD 64 will give you more CPU bang for the buck than any current Intel product currently. So a dual core AMD 64 is the way to go IMHO, but I'm waiting for prices to drop out of the stratosphere - shouldn't be too much longer for the bigger cache models...