As far a dual core goes IMB has had them for years (power 4), my guess is Macs will have them first along with X-box and new maybe new playstation. AMD may beat Intel as I think they are/will get some help from IBM. Intel may have they most for R&D but look what they get for it, they are not really ahead of any one, Itainium anyone? millions of dollars and no where? Pentium 4 fast but not really built for speed not really speed. Celeron oops 1.4 duron owns a 2.4 Celeron costs half as much and the core is the same as a P4 put some more cache on that sucker(they are going to soon)as far Hyper Threading people think it such a big deal but all it does is SIMULATE dual core to more efficiently utilize the "un-efficient" pipeline(wich is not so bad on the. Note, whenever performance is tested on a HT box, it's disabled as having multiple threads running on a highly optimized code stream can actually hinder performance. some things are faster and some are slower so who needs it well I guess the Prescott does with its 31 stage beast, all along I have been thinking overall speed Intel speed would ramp up when the came out with 256k L2 Celerons until just now since it will be based on the Prescott core. some folks also like to rave about the Pentium M its good technology better speed per MHz but it doesn't use that much less power that an XP mobile and they are faster save maybe the new Dolthan but its probably 3 times the cost. this may read like an anti Intel post, its not their stuff is good but you would think that since they have more than 20 times(just guessing lot more I bet who knows) the resources. you would think the would be a clear technological leader like the way ATI and NVIDIA are in the 3-d world vs VIA, S-3 etc. at least ATI and Nvidia are of simair size.