I have been running a couple of 165 boards for rendering and data crunching which has worked quite well for the past least 2 years...

However, when I set it up, I concluded that the ideal upgrade would be migrating to 8 way processors. So now we have the Core i7(almost 8 core), but... this little voice inside says I should wait for 8 physical cores before making the jump.

So... AMD throws the PII out into the field and it looks very tempting! My take is if I can place a couple of Phenom II's under water I might actually double my mini-cluster performance which would be a significant leap in performance.

The question is... am I right in expecting Phenom II rigs to double my current performance or should I just wait for 8 true cores, or... settle on a Core i7?

PS. my current 165's are both running at 3Ghz.