6-coreOpteron
 

Great. I've had my quad-core i7 for barely 6 months, and find out about 6-core Opterons...

AMD fills out six-core Opteron lineup | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

You'll never keep up with the latest and greatest. Don't even try. That road leads to madness.

Opteron is a sever chip. Requires a server board and registered ram.
For a home class workstation I think you did fine. But there were 8 cpu MB's (times 4cores each) available long before you bought your i7.

I believe Intel is working on 8-core chips for next year. Not sure tho if they will be available for server only market or us pc builders by next year.

When will they offer quads etc in laptops? Even the MBP is just dual core. is it the battery drain?

Battery is part of it, heat is another. The core 2 duo's are already lap burners. They need to find ways to reduce heat output, or cool them better in a laptop form. It will happen tho, just not sure when.

I've wondered that myself. Last Dec 28, 2008, Intel announced a couple of quadcore chips for laptops. One was around 2.4ghz if I am not mistaken and it is in the U$349 for the chip. I was glad because I thought we'd have one by mid-2009, for something like U$1,200-1,800. But it's almost 3rd Q now and nothing. I guess, the economic crisis made many notebook makers wary. Plus the great boom on the netbooks, quad core laptops were the least of their concern and the market there seems small.

There were some quad notebooks, but their prices were atrocious at U$2,800-3,500. They have large LCDs, have powerful GPUs, and poor battery life (1 hour only). They were for gamers on the go or power workstations on the go. Not for editors or multimedia specialists, though you can use them for that. But it was not practical. Try lugging one that is around 10-12lbs and 19" LCD to do an SDE for a wedding!

Now Intel is readying i7 based chips for 3rd or 4th Q 2009 release. We'll see if we'll finally have a quadcore notebook. We should have them. Normally, it's about 1 year after a major chip revision (i7s are major). And it should not be more than 18 months. But of course the economic crisis, and all other things going on might change what they will offer.

We'll see. But if they can build an i7 notebook for U$1,200-1,800, I'd be happy. For sure, there will be one. Whether we'll see it this year or next year is the real question.

You can get Core2 Quads in Dell & HP laptops, and Core i7 Quads in Sagers & Lenovos right now.

The Intel chips coming out in the next six months or so are to be, as has been said, 8 core with 16 effective threads. They will be awesome and 1366 compatible, so it appears a new mobo for i7 users will not be necessary.

This is great. Once USB 3 and Sata III come out, in combination with RAIDed SSDs, we'll really be set.

Your right.

The SSDs sound really exciting. Like the best upgrade for your system since the first Intel chip.

As far as AMD, I would never stray from Intel. The industry is built around Intel chips and hardware just has a better chance of working at its best when you use their chips.

Sager laptops are available with Quad core CPU. (that's desktop CPU)
I bought mine (the Sager NP9262) a year ago from xoticpc.com.

SSDs are just becoming interesting due to speed and capacity increases. Check here for speed increases, although the recent addition of the RAM disk has made the bar charts unreadable. Still, consider the RAM disk for WinXP users that need a very fast scratch "disk".

PassMark Software - Hard Drive Benchmark Charts

SSDs are also less interesting because they become slower and show data corruption with time. What's scarier? Losing your whole drive at one time or inaccurate writes ?