AMD are to start making Dual Core CPUs in 2005. Mid 2005 for servers and Late 2005 for Workstations and High end client machines. Maybe the average PC microsoft where to “recomend” for Longhorn will be the average PC when longhorn is released? It might be true! Think about it. this is me looking into the future, but Intel are releasing single core chips at 3.4Gz at the moment. there talking about Dual core, and smaller dies. If they can get a smaller die running @ even 3Gz and make it dual core, theres a theoretical 6Gz processor. And HT will more then likley be enabled on it, so its actually 4 way. Now in the post above, microsoft where meant to be recomending (meant to becasue Scoble replyed to these requirements) a 4 – 6Gz dual core processor with 2Gb ram and up to 1tb hard drive space. Im running my machine with 1Gb ram (or was) and a lot of new gaming rigs are comming as standard with 1Gb. So 2Gb is only around the corner! I have already talked about the processor, but as for Hdd. 300Gb hard drives are out now, theres talk of 500Gb drives for servers and 400Gb for workstations and this is early 2004. early last year we maxed out about 200Gb or so. just over a year later its double! by 2006, who knows how much HDD Space people will have! So, maybe the idea that Longhorn will say thats an average machine is not so mad of an idea after all… [update] more info about the dual core AMDs here at anandtech.