I'm sorry, but that bit of marketing on the website doesn't support your claims: They didn't just recompile with an Intel compiler. They worked together with Intel personnell to change the DLLs. (If recompiling for P4 optimizations is such a trivial task, why did they need to work together with Intel to do it?) Indeed, they just recompiled some DLLs, but they MODIFIED key DLLs so that they now make use of SSE. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that that is where most performance gain comes from. BTW 5 to 30% performance increase isn't even all that much. Simply using a better compiler can already give you 10%. (not speaking about P4 optimizations here) And Intel has very talented programmers that have realised such performance gains just by optimizing code without making use any specific P4 or SSE parts. Also I wonder how much the P3 and Athlon XP benefit from that package. Because the modification to the DLLs involved SSE, which is usefull for P4, but also for P3 and Athlon XP which have exactly the same SSE functions. Although the pack is marketed as a P4 pack, the text clearly indicates that is was made to improve both P3 and P4. Now your other points: - Those programs you have that have some sort of optimization (that's actually noticable, and not just marketing) are very likely all much more expensive than Poser4 or Poser5. For Lightwave, Cinema4D, or 3DsMax it is much easier to hire Intel for some help, and they probably have more experienced coders to start with anyway. For relatively low-cost programs like Poser the situation is quite different. - Quake3 is a very interesting case. The GAME is very much optimised for the P4. (Again with help from Intel programmers). The performance of the P4 with the game is stellar. But the ENGINE apparantly doesn't have that much optimizations. Because in all other games that use the Quake3 engine, the P4 doesn't perform nearly as well as with the quake3 game. In fact in most of those games it loses to the Athlons. - .NET has very little to do with CPU optimizations at all. Don't get me wrong. The P4 isn't a bad cpu, but it is mainly developed from a marketing standpoint (people are easily fooled by high Mhz numbers) and it simply isn't better than the competition and on top of that is more expensive then the competition. I don't see any advantages on it's design. It can shine in niche products where SSE2 can be used to effectively. But support in programs is rare, and by the time lots of programs use it, the competition has SSE2 too. (That's not new. It happened with MMX and SSE too) In cases where it can't profit from SSE2 is is often slower then the competition. I buy a CPU for the programs I use NOW and not for future optimizations. Right NOW programs use SSE optimizations at best. Next year there might be lots of programs that use SSE2, but by that time I will want to buy a new CPU anyway. The competition has SSE2 support then too. Right NOW for Poser4 the P4 is clearly not the best choice. Whether you care about that is another question. Especially since other factors are clearly very important to Poser4 performance too. We'll see what happens when Poser5 finally arrives. (if the P4 is still used by that time ;-))