@jms22
Yup. Marketing droids in action, what did you really expect? Gotta push something "new and shiny" or people might just not spend money on things with them - things we don't need, but they need to sell.
And legacy software that could be re-written to use more than one thread/core, but isn't (yet, and maybe never).
It makes me sick to see many things that are trivially parallelizable sit and eat 100% of one core while the rest just sit there (and do cache coherency stuff etc etc, yes, I once designed this kind of thing). The only exceptions at this point appear to be video editing (yay) and some Java stuff (which for me, is a yuck, I don't write it though, thank heavens).
I do manage to do well enough when I design big data acquisition systems with databases and gui's, but I do think about how I'm going to "program into the strengths of the platform" before I do a design. BTW, that'd be scientific data aq, not advertising, which is disgusting.
They simply hit a mhz (ghz really) limit with affordable silicon processes, but had the need to keep the company going, so, the trick was, how can we use more transistors, since we have them, yet can't make the ones we had any big amount faster without severe cost increases and exotic materials. So we have what we have...