Attached Link: Product Information Sheet

> Quote - There is a Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600 Gateway on sale right now with a good graphics card. How much faster will Poser render on a quad core as opposed to my 3.4 GHz P4 singe core with 2 gigs of RAM, or will it make any difference? Thanks

 

Oh boy will it make a difference! I don't think, however, that the Quad Processor will make a performance difference over a single Intel Core 2  duo (dual processor) for rendering, but you will be able to devote two of the Quad's processors to rendering, and use the other two for web-browsing etc. (In retrospect, I almost wish I'd waited before getting my new machine, but my old one was crashing constantly.) The Quad processor is really just a pair of the Intel Core2's on a single chip.

The Intel Core2 duo is the sweetest processor to come along in a long time. For the following reasons:

1. 4 MB L2 cache shared between the two processors. Cache sharing is more efficient than the older architecture where each processor had its own cache. 4 MB is a heck of a lot of cache. (For a contrast, the Celeron has about 1/2 MB.) For those of you who might not remember, cache memory is the ultra fast memory which allows the processor to keep data which is likely to be used soon "near to hand".
   2. The chip architecture is significantly improved. They've essentially reduced the time taken to execute each machine instruction by allowing for fetching four instructions at once per processor, as well as improved the pipelining, and allowing pre-fetch of data to allow out-of-order execution of instructions (essentially overlapping executing of instructions which don't use the same data.) The net result is that a single processor does more at a 2.6 GHz clock speed than a traditional P4 can do at a much higher clock speed. (I've seen benchmarks as high as 4 GHz) It is also supposedly pretty easy to overclock if you are into that sort of thing.
2. The chip is more suited to the more advanced motherboards. It can handle front-side bus speeds of up to 1033 MHz. (This is the transfer speed between internal components other than I/O devices.) So you can use really fast memory as well.

BTW, mine has been remarkably stable -- I've had it about four months and it has only had a system crash twice (both within the past week, and on the same program.)