My point is that because of stagnation of ILP and cache size, the number of cores will increase anyway, so we'd have to find a way to utilise this resource anyw

My point is that because of stagnation of ILP and cache size, the number of cores will increase anyway, so we'd have to find a way to utilise this resource anyway. Of course, trading single core performance for the number of cores is pointless in most of the desktop use cases.