It's nice that, with the ISA being open, now IBM won't need to compete with commodity chip maker pressures and niche providers can make directly compatible chip

It's nice that, with the ISA being open, now IBM won't need to compete with commodity chip maker pressures and niche providers can make directly compatible chips on a regular schedule which suits their niches best. As for the number of cores, memory bandwidth needs to keep those cores fed and now we're just seeing real memory bandwidth improvements - the number of cores and threads is expected to increase commensurately with that in the next revisions of the micro-architecture. Shipping excellent, up to date, and competitive processors is more than just releasing a moderately tweaked, more tightly binned SKU every 6 months.