Keep in mind Moore's law as originally stated was a law of economics, not engineering -- that decreasing feature size means more dice and thus more revenue per

Keep in mind Moore's law as originally stated was a law of economics, not engineering -- that decreasing feature size means more dice and thus more revenue per wafer, while also increasing the performance of the individual ICs. These days I think energy usage is the overriding concern, both because of thermal limits in high performance systems, and energy budgets in low-power systems. A smartphone which is fast enough to play Farmville or run a python interpreter is cool and sells well, but there is still a huge economic incentive to cut energy usage further, since that would increase battery life. The core of your argument seems to be that since things like netbooks, smartphones, Python and Ruby are currently "fast enough", there is little incentive to increase the core count. I disagree with that, because energy savings will (or would) still add massive economic value. Whether these kinds of systems will become reality is a different question, since of course programming them is a very hard problem. But how cool would it be to have a smartphone with 100 cores, each running at a few MHz or so (and apps which use them efficiently) and battery life of a month or so? Also, think of how motivated companies with datacenters are to reduce energy costs.