Yurie: 71,787

Haruhi 78,369

Akane: 102,880

Mikan: 99,800

So a 2.26GHz Nehalem is about the same speed as a 2.66GHz Core 2.  And both are a good bit faster than a 2.6GHz Athlon.  Also, 64-bit Python is 20% faster than 32-bit.  (Though this drops to 10% with Unladen Swallow.)

But Psyco, the JIT compiler, still wallops everything else, more than three times as fast as the nearest competitor.  Google is working on a project named Unladen Swallow, an attempt to improve Python's speed, which may one day free us from the genteel tyranny of 32-bit environments and Python 2.x.  Psyco doesn't work in 64-bit mode or Python 3.x, but its performance benefits outweigh all other concerns thus far.  Python 2.x is still under active development - new features, not just maintenance - and OpenVZ allows me to set up 32-bit environments under a 64-bit kernel.

The Unladen Swallow developers actually warn against taking Pystone as a representative benchmark, and don't use it to guide their performance tuning; nonetheless it provides a 20% to 30% improvement even in its first release.