Thanks for all the replies.

As to the suggestion about a single processor quad core...it's still around $110,000. SAS prices as CPU x Cores. $110 vs $170 is still many, many tens of thousands of dollars more than what we're looking at spending. Again, we won't be getting $110,000 more value from the SAS software, we'll get more value from the new hardware. Oh well!

I'm giving a serious look to going with WPS. I realize it's STATs offerings are very limited right now, but we use that very infrequently. So I can move everyone to desktops running WPS, and maybe keep a single box running SAS with STAT. This would give us the performance improvements desired without having to spend money we don't have. Plus, we would be supporting a startup competitor-esque company, which is good. Competition creates better products and better prices...in theory. ;)