We know Apple just annoucned they’re going Intel, but AMD would just like you to know that by the time Apple’s moved over to x86 in 2007, they’re planning on having quad-core CPUs on the market;and we ain’t just talking dual-core Hyperthreaded devices. Later plans include scalability to up to 32 processors in their devices, but since most applications still aren’t multi-threaded and won’t take advantage of such systems, we’re hoping they’ve got some tricks in their bag for making faster really mean faster.
Well, in the very least, you get what I call “Application-Level Parallelism”, you multi-tasking in OS X and now each CPU will have only around 1/4 the number of processes, this will definitely speed things up, maybe not 4x, but definitely more than double. 🙂 IIRC programs like Photoshop already takes advantage of multiprocessor with a plugin, at least this is true for CS, maybe CS2 got that integrated already. OS X also has SMP support. Maybe they would even add NUMA support in the future. 🙂
The Core Image algorithms are already optimized for the dual G5 PMacs also.