TazmnianDv@... wrote: {extensive quotes on Power 5 etc} The use of words like "awesome" in that article cracked me up a little I must say and I am not sure what talking up the Power architecture vs Itanium in the Unix/Linux server market has to do with DAWs but I guess there is some stuff of interest to us in there too. The Power series from IBM has been a multi-chip setup - not a single chunk of silicon with multiple cores. Earlier iterations of the Power architecture were adapted ( with the addition of a small contribution from Motorola) to make the first PowerPC chip - the 601. So the last decade or more of PowerPC has been based heavily on the IBMs Power architecture. There can be no surprise if new editions of PowerPC chips for Mac or whatever application (the motor industry uses heaps of PowerPC chips for example) derive from newer versions of IBMs Power range. That Apple should be given any credit for this hardware - other than that they placed orders for it - seems a bit of a stretch. Sure, they are the initial market for the G5 ( maybe your car's sat navigation system will run on a G5 in 2008) and forthcoming chips but the development and fabrication is IBM all the way - I don't know how much if any IBM cribbed from DEC's Alpha, Intel and AMD certainly did. There is a large degree of inevitability about all this. With the shrinking of linear dimensions of components on CMOS with each successive generation, consumer processors will soon have room for 1 Billion+ transistors - multicore designs are one of the moves which was envisioned decades ago. It is an obvious way to make use of the doubling of available transistors with each shrink of the process. Before the end of this year multicore x86 chips will be on the market and probably they will be everywhere by the end of next year. Being able to move more and more components off daughter cards or the mother board - MMU, cache, probably graphics processing in time - and onto the core is the other obvious development which has been happening progressively. AMD's Opteron/Athlon64 has memory management ( MMU ) built onto the processor die and has multicore logic built in already. There have been some interesting articles comparing the pros and cons of the different approaches taken by Intel and AMD in handling cache and main memory access in their forthcoming multicore versions of the Opteron and whatever Intel is going to call the P4's successor. Extoling the genius of IBMs cache strategies in isolation seems a little parochial. The other more revolutionary processor family that might be of interest in our future is the Cell chip which Sony and IBM are developing -initially for the PS3 but for all kinds of devices in time. As DAW users running lots of plugins simultaneously, we are exactly the sorts of people who stand to benifit from increasing parallelism in processors. With a bit of luck they will be able to build us something someday soon that'll run rings around what we have now but won't sound like Vertical takeoff/landing aircraft landing in the studio or melt a hole through the bottom of the case. Regards, Murray