I can pipe in and honestly say that I've seen a speed improvement too, especially after telling it to use 4 threads (though I only have one processor). and extra especially after telling it to render in a separate process.

And even if there wasn't much of a speed increase, P7 won't freeze up during a render if you get you settings right.  It handles thing differently, so gone are the days of making a huge scene and then wondering if it is doing anything after six hours, only to have to ctrl-alt-del your way out.

Now it will render, it might take time, but it will push that image through without stopping.  That's their claim and I haven't locked it up yet.

So you know, I'm running an AMD 2600 1.25GB RAM.  Nothing special, but the multiprocessor thingy still gave me an obvious performance increase.