From: "Rich Gauszka" 

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2007-04-19/#6671

After dropping the MHz race, Intel decided to improve performance and power
of its CPU by increasing the number of cores in the same CPU chips. So one
can have lower clocked CPU but higher performance level. Today Intel
unveiled a "proof-of-concept" CPU encompassing... 80 Cores. If it
is not meant to be commercially available next year, it illustrates the
current strategy: one can reach extreme performance level by multiplying
the number of cores. This prototype CPU almost reaches TFLOPS while
consuming "only" 191.79W.

Of course, doubling the number of Cores every six months will be
interesting only if one can benefit from them, so applications as well as
the operating system have to become natively "multicore aware".
As we demonstrate it recently the 8 Core Xeon Mac Pro is faster than the
previous Quad Core model when requiring heavy multitasking power.

One way to benefit from multi core CPU without having to rewrite too many
codes for application developers might be the use of
hardware/multithreading/core multiplexing.

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