Also, Paul Keeble said: Further to that the core explosion stopped at quads because no one could utilise the additional cores and the memory bus couldn’t keep up. Modern CPUs are a cache with a small bit of logic on the side that represents the cores.
Did it? Last I checked both AMD and Intel ship 6-core designs, and Intel has 8s as well. They’re expensive and mostly aimed at the server market, but it sure seems like the idea that nobody could utilize them, or that it “stopped at quad” is untenable, given that people keep buying them and thinking they’re using them pretty well…
Memory buses also keep getting faster.
Can you give us a source for the idea that most of the content of a modern CPU die is cache rather than cores? It sure doesn’t look that way from pictures of, say, an Ivy Bridge i7…