>>> Why are we doing this to ourselves when we have SO much chip area available now and could scale performance linearly with cost? Multicore performance doesn

>>> Why are we doing this to ourselves when we have SO much chip area available now and could scale performance linearly with cost? Multicore performance doesn't scale linearly because 1) adding more cores has rapidly diminishing returns on performance for most problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law) and 2) the cost of coherency is exponential with the number of cores.