You might have been asked that dreaded question by an employer, but...

Intel sees that differently.

http://www.i4u.com/article6672.html
Intel Promises 80 Core CPUs within 5 years.

And here I was, getting all set to wax philosophical...

Y'all been spared that. :D

It will be interesting to see how well this works.  In the early 90's, TeraData had servers that could accomodate up to 12 cpu's, but documented that after 8, additional cpu's didn't increase performance!  All the power went into task scheduling between cpus resulting in no net gain.

80 cores might involve setting a lot of task-to-core affinity to approach throughput proportional to the sum of the horsepower.

Obviously, I don't see M$ coming anywhere near getting this right.

broadbandit wrote You might have been asked that dreaded question by an employer, but... Intel sees that differently. http://www.i4u.com/article6672.html Intel Promises 80 Core CPUs within 5 years.

Maybe it's just too early to tell yet, but 1,395.94 in RAC seems to be low for a Quad core.  I am estimating that this sucker should be in the 2,500+ range.