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.
Stands to reason...someday they will have no choice BUT to leave the x86 pattern of doing things.
Die shrinks and additional cores help with computing progress. A single-core Intel “Prescott” at 90nm used approx 115W at peak load. Now you have a processor (45nm “Nehalem”) with 4 much more efficient cores that use the less than that amount of power that provide 6X+ the computational power.