It depends on your budget. I recently upgraded my main computer for the first time in 7 years, and splurged on the quad core intel chip. I run some home brewed calculation intensive scientific code on all four cores, and I can watch HDTV at the same time. Right now, the more cores the better. My system won't need a processor upgrade for quite awhile. Once more apps are written for multicore, it will be very important.
I would also consider the Intel chips. While they are more expensive, they are creaming AMD in almost every benchmark, especially when it comes to multimedia. The Intel SSE3/4 processor extensions are going to greatly improve encoding once programmers start implementing them. |