RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on May 12, 2013 12:36 am wrote:
> Actually, I don't see "increasing numbers of cores". We seem to be settling down
> at 2C for the low end, and 4C for mid-high.

We've been at quad-core from Kentsfield Core2-quad in Nov 2006 until now,
and the vast majority of Haswell desktop/laptop chips will also be
dual or quad-core presumably until at least early 2015. Desktop/laptop
chips with more than 4 cores are still, and perhaps forever, a very small
niche.

Instead of getting more and more cores, the trend has been towards integrating
more stuff on the die (DRAM controllers, PCIe interface, GPU), adding larger
caches, and adding specialized hardware for performance-critical functions
(AES encryption; video transcoding; random number generation; wider vector
processing; virtualization). So apparently Intel agrees with me that large
numbers of hardware threads aren't particularly useful for desktop/laptop
systems.