Yes I agree Snowy, for most desktop PC's a quad core is quite sufficient, still.
I wonder if a few commodity i7s, on a Beowulf cluster, would be faster and make better sense economically?
I'm not well clued up on Beowulf clusters.
Would be more power hungry and less capable of running every day programs and apps, I think.
It could have some cool number crunching abilities but these days they tend to use graphics cards for that.
I'm only guessing though.