> Our bottle neck is (a) compactPCI backplane reading data from waveform digitizers
> to the frontend CPUs and (b) CPU power on the frontend CPUs to analyzer the waveforms.

I forgot to mention that our front-ends at MEG are 2.8 GHz dual Xenon with Hyperthreading.
This gives "virtual" 4 CPU cores which are really necessary for waveform calibration and
analysis. It makes use of the new multi-threading feature in the midas front-end. I run
actually 7 threads (one VME readout, 4 calibration threads, one encoding thread and the
main thread sending data to the backend. This speeds up data taking by a factor of four
compared to a single thread. So if one plans for waveform analysis in the frontend to
reduce the data, I would recommend a box with dual quad cores.