[OT] Communicating Ruby programs and processor choice

Pardon this intrusion, as this is somewhat OT, but I need answers from
those intimately familiar with ruby implementation.

My home PC of circa 2002 has died and the prognosis is that I need a
replacement.  I'm doing work involving DRb, ostensibly over a
network but having two processes talking to 127.0.0.1 on the same
machine is useful during development -- it was, will be running
Windows XP.  So I'm wondering whether ruby programs will experience
the issues of parallelism (deadlock, starvation...) on a dual-core
processor, or whether I need two whole processors to get realistic
results.  I certainly saw these issues with two processors, and I
suspect that the cores of dual-core processors are just the ALU
parts, essentially, not caches etc.

I'm being told that to have a dual CPU machine will cost me =A31400 on top
of what I'd pay otherwise.

Given the OT nature of this query, please respond off-list and if people
wish I will summarize. =20

        Thank you,
        Hugh