Uhhhh, blueskymining I hate to burst your bubble, but you've made a few less-than-correct statements.

First, The G5 is cycle-per-cycle qute a bit faster than the G4. It has little to do with 64-bit or not - while a 64-bit OS and applications will be somewhat faster (and a whole lot more efficient for large-memory apps), the real gain in in processor efficiency. The G5 can execute four instructions per clock cycle (in a perfect world), the G4 is limited to three. In addition, the G5 has a much faster frontside bus, as well as considerably more I/O and memory bandwidth.

Second, MP can be quite a bit more efficient than you state. I've been working with MP systems for 10 years now, and I've seen some systems that hit linear (and in one weird case, super-linear) performance curves. A *lot* has to do with the OS and application, and how well they thread. Typically, on the G5, I'm seeing about 80-85% improvement by turning the second processor on.

Finally, have you actually worked on a G5? I'm lucky, I have - both at work and at home I have dual G5's. At work, we've seen some truly impressive results on a heavy mix of I/O and CPU. Results that put a dual G4 to shame. (Not to mention a dual 2.4GHz P4 Xeon and a Sun 280R.) As for home, I work on a variety of A/V applications and I am impressed with the results. (To be honest, I used the systems at work, got hooked, and then lucked out and found a way to afford a dual G5.)

So, artificial benchmarks aside, I have no problem stating that the G5 is the fastest desktop I've ever had the pleasure to use.