Intel must be quite concerned that it's latest chips, while just grand for web serving and other concurrent-but-primarily-isolated use cases, don't do much for my mom and dad compared to those of a couple years ago. So, I can see why they're putting so much effort into parallel computing research, open source, etc. But, the world has a long, long way to go before I can tell my dad that he would really benefit from an eight core processor. Maybe Intel has also concluded that the desktop computer as we know it is in the twilight of its existence in people's homes?<p>I don't play games, so I can't answer this question.... Do gamers benefit from eight cores? I think Photoshop does a reasonable job of parallelizing compute-intensive stuff, so the graphics crowd would benefit from an I7. CAD users, etc. of course. Is the PC soon to be a niche product?