I dunno if you people like the tech specs of processors or not, but who cares.

AMD's new quad core opterons, socket F, have been released for a few weeks now. Of course I don't find any real bench marks yet, because the opterons are designed for running servers, not desktops. However, that hasn't stopped people from using them for gaming, because they over clock beautifully and end up with better performance than its Athlon brothers (Phenom for the quad cores, but they aren't released yet.)

If you look at the tech specs, you'd think right off the bat that intel just got its ass handed too them, but I don't know how well they actually fair.

AMD's quad core, the top end, can be over clocked too 4.7 GHz with liquid cooling(I dunno if 4.7 Ghz is true or not), and most can get it up too 3.8 GHz with just a fan and heat sink. It is a true quad core, unlike intels. Not only that, they can run two quad cores in one mother board (All socket mother boards F come with two CPU slots, and require two CPU's to function.). Which means 8 processors in one desktop, and quit a few games are being optimized to use all 8 cores.

Now, from what I hear from people who have the 4X4 set up, it beats by a lot. However, most of these sources are AMD fan boys, so I can't rely on their input.

I dunno about you guys, but I can't wait till I see some bench marks for the AMD Opteron 8347 Barcelona, let alone the Phenom's family, which will be out late 2007 or early 2008, or so they say.

Not all Opterons are server processors but there are server class workstation processor versions of the Opteron. Like mine, I use an Opteron. Its physically slower than an equivalent Intel but it can catch up.

I know opterons can be used in desktops. They use a higher quality silicon than their athlon brothers, which means they over clock quit well, and since they use the same architecture you can get better performance with an OC'd opteron than you can with most Athlons.

I know a guy over IRC who has one of these for his desktop.

it still doesn't help with slowdown in ZSNES, though

Yeah, I've never really understood why emulators will still go slow even on a more-than-capable machine. I get slowdowns playing Metal Slug X, exactly like the arcade machines... WTF?

Its not the machine though... those games were optimized to run on the hardware and drivers used by PCs. The emulator will only trick the software into running and that doenst necessarily mean they will run good and vice versa for PC games on consoles which is why it costs so much more to make a console platform version for any PC game.

Emulators will always have their bugs. There is nothing you can do about your hardware to fix them. You could always try programming a better one though, which would hardly be worth it seeing as how the SEGA OWN SNES! Sonic FTW!

Also, not all applications are multithreaded.

It doesn't matter that you have a dozen core processor if the application can only run on one of them