After I hit enter, I realized this one might get more millage on the 
mailing list:

17:08 < kyron> Following yesterday's blowout, I'm asked to build up the 
possibility of replacing the old cluster (machines are +5yo) with new 
hardware. I'm hesitant between dual core
               Xeons E3110 and Quad Core Q6600 . The price difference 
for a 7 node system is ~220$ more for the Q6600... So, would 14 Xeon 
cores (qith SSE4.1) outweigh 28 Q6600 cores
               ...most of our computation is basic vectorial stuff 
(k-means, k-nn, SVM...)

The "blowout" is what seems to be an extension that was under specs for 
the load (~10.5Amp constant load)... some compelling pics: 
http://wiki.neuralbs.com/~kyron/WrongSpecs/

Eric Thibodeau