hardware

Minimum 2 physical cpu cores and all the RAM you can afford. That's pretty much the advice I can give you - it really doesn't matter if the cpu is AMD or Intel or which motherboard you get, for FEA in general, you cannot get too much RAM and cpu-speed. If you want to get a bit fancy, you can get a solid state drive, since a lot of data is being written and read (mostly) at the beginning and end of an analysis.

Note: *some* hardware doesn't play nice with Linux, so you should google the components you choose like 'hardware + Linux + problems' or something like that - that can save you a lot of headaches.

Core2Duo is just a brand name from Intel. Now multi-cores are called i3, i5 and i7 from Intel and amongst other things 'Phenom' from AMD - I don't keep up much with hardware lately though.

I wonder if you can even buy a cpu with 2 cores anymore or if they are all 4 or more cores.

I have maxed out my RAM on several occasions and I have 4GB so anything less is not going to be any fun to work with.