OT: Building a new computer...

[AstralWanderer]

Fyron said:
Or, just by being intelligently designed, so as not to be huge and bloaty...

Well one person's bloat is another person's critical feature and the top-performing firewalls are now expanding into areas like system, process and registry control. That is of lesser relevance in this thread though - the point I was making was that security software can benefit from an extra core.

[Fyron]

AstralWanderer said:
"...the top-performing firewalls are now expanding into areas like system, process and registry control..."

Good god man, that is not at all what a firewall should be doing. All it should do is monitor and shape TCP and UDP packets according to a defined set of rules... Talk about feature bloat. The only way a firewall should "expand" is by more expressive rule language, or covering IPv6 packets...

"...the point I was making was that security software can benefit from an extra core."

That point is mistaken though; good security software that does its job properly, and doesn't try to include the kitchen sink, has a minimal footprint. No background processes should necessitate the need for a whole CPU core...