In buying a new Dell Precision 470 Workstation (running MS XP-
Pro)what if any is the performance improvement with dual mono core
processors or dual dual core processors versus a single dual core
processor that would be seen when running ESRI MapPro doing mapping
and relabling of features in a very large file? Opitons are two dual
core Xeon processors (e.g. 2X Dual-core Intel 2.8GHz Xeons), two
single core Xeon processor (e.g. 2X Xeon 3.8Ghz Xeon)  versus  a
single dual core processor (e.g. Dual-core Intel Xeon 2.8 Ghz,). And
is there any benefit in going beyond 1 MB ram in this application? 
Please respond only if you are truly expert in this application.

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Clarification of Question by chuc-ga on 21 Nov 2005 12:23 PST

The application is ArcMap/ArcView from ESRI (Not MapPro).  The primary
task that is taxing the current computer is relabling of thousands of
roads and features.  This can taking up to twenty minutes.  Looking
for the optimum CPU/Hardware to process this faster.

Dual processors will only help if the ESRI app can utilize them. 
Software has to be specifically written to take advantage of multiple
processors for it to get a performance boost.  Think of it like this,
if written a certain way the software could hand half of the labeling
task to one processor and the other half to the other.  If not written
that way, it will use one processor and the other one will sit idle.

I wrote to ESRI's pre-sales people a couple of months ago about ArcGIS
Desktop (ArcMap, etc., under the ArcView or ArcEdit license) and
asked,

"Will this software take advantage of multiple CPUs or multi-core CPUs
for day-to-day work? E.g., if I perform a time-consuming calculation
on the dataset, will it run better on a computer with two 2.0 GHz
processors, or one 3 GHz processor?"

Their response was:

"The software will work on dual processor CPU?s but will not harness
all the power except for some of our server products."

I think this means that the desktop software (including ArcMap) is 
single-threaded, so performance will not scale up as you add
processors (i.e., it does not divide the work up into separate threads
that can run simultaneously on different processors). My guess would
be that on a dual processor system, one processor would be used by
ArcView and the other would be used to do all the background stuff
that Windows does. But beyond that, you probably wouldn't see any
performance improvement in ArcMap as you add processors. I think you
want one or two fast processor cores, rather than four slower cores.