Future x86 Mac?

This is interesting to me because it shows a strategy that Apple (as a hardware company) could take after the processor transition. If the Mac OS is available for x86 there is a possibility that it could be used with non-Apple hardware and making a quad pentium 4 processor Power Mac coupled with Apple's engineering savvy would definately set the Mac apart from some clone. Also since Apple's $2000 Powermac "runs Photoshop nearly two times faster than a Pentium 4-based system" as apple says on their site, a machine with this power would make it faster than your typical PC. http://www.apple.com/powermac/

Would you be interested in a Mac with 4 physical processors? (8 logical cores)

And do you think the current price of $1999 for a PowerMac would suffice for a machine like this from Apple?

Does anyone have a clue about the "stream_d" processes that are hogging six virtual processors in the Activity Monitor window? Is this some kind of problem or what?

Otherwise, I do not think Apple has any plans to make quad-processor systems. Do to diminishing performance returns and the fact that such quad-processor systems are well outside of Apple's niche, they will stick with dual processors, albeit with increasing number of cores. Something like a quad-Xeon is basically meant to be a medium weight server and OS X currently has some flaws in that area: http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=1

I would much rather get dual-Cell blade for high performance computing than something like this.

Does anyone have a clue about the "stream_d" processes that are hogging six virtual processors in the Activity Monitor window? Is this some kind of problem or what?

stream_d is a processor benchmarking process.