oh... as for performance increases... pentium 4s use a 21 stage pipeline or something like that... so they take approximately 21 clock cycles to get anything done. AMD uses about 7 stages (or something in that neighbourhood) so if you divide 2.8 by 21 and 2.0 (my Athlon64) by 7, you get a really interesting breakdown. You'll certainly find a HUGE increase in performance, ESPECIALLY if you go dual-core. As for dual-core and 64bit kernels and the like... there was a few. you'd be looking at the amd64-generic-SMP kernels (I think) the amd64 is for 64bit (x86_64) and the generic is b/c I don't know if opterons are considered a k8 thing (I'd have to go check) and the SMP is to give you dual-core action, so you can use the withering power now avaliable to you. It's soooooooooooooooooo cool... someday I'll get one... until then I just annoy everyone with wordy descriptions of 'em.
and for those of you who're mentally screaming at my crude way of benchmarking the two cpus, it's only for a ballpark comparison. by no means is that ENTIRELY accurate, and should NOT be treated as such.
