smee440,

Actually the i7 is a 4-core CPU with Hyperthreading for each core. ; )   I'm running a Mac Pro, 8-core 2.8 GHz Xeons, and Vista Business 64-bit (under Bootcamp), w/ 14 GB RAM.  I selected Vista Business, as Home Premium definately does not support 8 hardware cores.  I'm wondering if MS programmed Vista Home Premium to differentiate between Hyperthreaded (virtual) cores, and real hardware cores, and use the virtual cores, but not the hardware cores?

At any rate, the i7 Hyperthreading is much more efficient than the old P4 Hyperthreading, so they are a good bang-for-the-buck.  Nice to have motherboards with 6 DDR3 slots too.