Quote Originally Posted by Sr7 View Post
This is a different time, when the gains to be had specifically in heavy workload arenas with GPGPU and Larrabee could very well make the CPU's moderate micro-arch improvements irrelevant. They're also up against limits of physics (thermal wall), as well as thresholds of perception in some cases like every day usage. I believe the average PC doesn't have enough workload to justify a new CPU like this (in light of other technologies which can massively speed up parallel applications).

Why spend top dollar on a new processor to process video at 10-40% improved speeds when you can do already do it at 400%-1,000%?

Granted, if they can stick more cores on there, and software developers can figure out how to thread 8 and 16 ways, you'll get comparable speed-ups. But such is the challenge before them.
wait wait ... there is a lot of marketing done about GPGPU right now, but your GPGPU will never boot your OS, or will never send email, or do the spelling correction
Your GPGPu can t encode for DivX 3.0 (or 99% of the video codecs), neither for MP3 (or 99% of the audio files) or many other legacy format, and thinking that all of those tasks will be done on the GPGPU is thinking that the world will be recompiled: This is naive.
You may get a marketing hype going, but the majority of the software will stay on the processor, why? : LEGACY!

people told me many time that Pentium III was more than what they need ... I hear this for 15 years.