Tom’s Hardware have benchmarks for Kentsfield, Intel’s new four core processor due later this year. Most applications don’t seem to be able to properly use four cores, but heavy multitasking and media encoding seem to really benefit. At the same time as Intel release Kentsfield, they’re also going to release Clovertown, a multiprocessor version for servers. Fingers crossed that these are available at a reasonable price by next Spring, and that Apple choose to offer them in the next update to the Mac Pro.

Coming back down to Earth for a moment, while I really like the idea of an 8 core Mac Pro, I do struggle to think of how I’d fully use 8 cores on a regular basis, and the chip does seem to be on the hot side. Just as important to me as power is having a quiet system, and two 100W+ processors are going to take a lot of cooling…