Thanks Studio2100. I have looked at Passmark bench marks, but they don’t tie up with Spice speed. For example, the Passmark benchmark for my old Athlon is 460. The Passmark benchmark for the dual, dual-core 3.5GHz Xeon with 6Gb of fast RAM was 5000 yet it was only 18% faster! Hence my enquiry as to whether AMD was going to be faster than the best Intel parts when you get to 8 cores. I know memory access is important in Spice, and the AMD memory architecture is significantly different from Intel. I found a paper where they compared an Intel dual core with a dual core Opteron and under some tests the AMD was 2-4 time faster; in others it was a little slower Unfortunately it could either be that much better or even slower than Intel and that would be an expensive mistake! I am trying to find a computer shop who has an AMD 8-core to test on, so far without success….