Multicores are admission of defeat - and they are here to stay...

Consumer systems aren't doing single linear tasks any more. There's generally a bunch of
intermittent stuff going on throughout the session, and a single task that the user's
attention is on, whose reaction time determines the quality of the user experience. For this
sort of workload, adding cores helps up to the maximum number of possible
simultaneously-running tasks. That is, people will watch movies while waiting for their
spreadsheets to recalculate, and they notice how long it takes and whether the movie is
smooth.

That means that, while O(N) cores isn't yet useful for most people, the small constant number
of useful cores is more than one. I expect that there will be demand for about 8 cores when
software developers get used to being able to do CPU-hungry background tasks without impacting
the interactive thread at all.