Upgrade now or wait?

I'm currently on an AMD Athlon 3800+, and it's killing me. Besides games, I often compile programs that take forever and use all my CPU. So I'm considering an upgrade to an Intel E6750 - it's about as expensive as I consider reasonable for a CPU upgrade. I'll need to get a new MB and RAM in the process.

The question is, is it really worth it? I hear Intels new processors will be released early next year - will that bring current Quad-core technology down in price significantly? I assume the Penryns themselves will cost an arm and a leg, but is it a good idea to wait until they are released to get four cores for the current price of two? Or do they usually wait a bit with the price drop? Any advice?

If you have AM2, then you could swap out your CPU for a faster AMD right now and then take whatever upgrade path works best three months from now. If you have socket 939, it looks like a major motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrade.

The question only you can answer is if you need it now. If so, then perhaps a motherboard that would accept a newer CPU down the line, and the cheapest CPU and RAM alternative that works now?

Though everyone's waiting for the penryns, I'm waiting for Phenom. They might not be as good as Intel's 45nm CPUs, but they'll be close enough in my price range. Though I was going to just flash the bios on my two AM2 boards (one Nvidia 405 and another AMD 690G), the DX10 hybrid Crossfire and SLI sound really good from a single GPU perspective, so I can't wait to upgrade the boards as well.