[CME]

I've always been an amd fan. Maybe because I like rooting for the "little guy". And I think the reason intel is more popular is the shear brute power the top end procs have. Price being no object, the intel procs seem to trump the amd every time. That said most of them are more powerful than a lot of is need. So we could probably easily get by on an amd. I just like to go for the most power I can afford. And in those cases intel seems to win.

That said I've seen a few people elude to the amd 8-cores being somewhat comparable to an equivalent intel in some multi-threaded apps. So they may not be as far behind as we think. But it's hard to beat the proven record intel has as of now.

And there are some features (instruction sets) chip makers includes in their chips that can be taken advantage of by programmers to make apps more efficient on their platform. Their was an article, I believe from intel, talking to an avid employee/programmer that stated they where working directly with intel to make pro tools run as efficiently as possible on their chips. Seemed to imply we would notice this more in upcoming pro tools releases with ivy bridge or newer chips. I'll see if I can find it. Just something else to consider.