[mamelukesabre]

Isn’t this the whole reason they went to multi core CPUs? They know they cant keep up moore’s law forever so they are hedging their bets and providing themselves a way to increase computing power without needing a die shrink every 20 months.

I expect in 50 years we will see home desktop computers with 25 CPUs and a hundred cores each...with RAM and solid state harddrives integrated onto the CPU circuitry...and wireless modems integrated onto CPUs as well.

Cooling will be by thermoelectric refrigeration(the Peltier effect) and will also be integrated onto the CPU circuitry.

[NVDave]

Yes and no.

There are several other architectural reasons for going to multi-core products, starting with issues of heat, clock speed, how deep they can set up a successful pipeline, memory bandwidth, etc.

At some point, the race for ultimate clock speed became counter productive. OK, so you have a couple choices at that point, and at least one of the choices involves leaving the x86 instruction set behind.

Intel ain’t about to do that. That isn’t an option.

So with that degree of freedom removed, you have to figure out how to make the x86 instruction set scale upwards in speed.

[antiRepublicrat]

Isn’t this the whole reason they went to multi core CPUs? They know they cant keep up moore’s law forever so they are hedging their bets and providing themselves a way to increase computing power without needing a die shrink every 20 month

Moore's Law is what's letting them put multiple CPUs on the same chip.