New machines come with multicore processors. Mine has eight, ought to be plenty fast. Unless the apps only use one of them, of course. Since the number of cores go up pretty quickly with each generation, while the speed of each core remains more or less the same, and the workload of the apps goes [...]

I have a hard time finding info on exactly which combinations of memory are doing exactly what on the Mac Pro 8-core. As far as I understand, full memory speed is only achieved with four memory modules, since the machine can access four in parallel. I did get four 2 Gb modules (800 MHz) from [...]