Multicore Plateau

there's been a lot of news on the net about new 4x4 or four core chips coming
out from both Intel and AMD later this year or early next year.. the details
of the technology are rather different due to architectural differences, but
i would feel that we're once again reaching a plateau soon..

it's a technology certainty that with current architectures, the performance
increase by adding more cores will plateau.. it's a case of diminishing
returns.. the reason is simply because of memory.. if memory is unable to
keep up with the processors, the bottleneck will be the memory bandwidth..
and four cores will just about max out the current bandwidth..

hence, it is likely that the last mainstream multi-core chips will be the quad
core chips.. larger number of cores will require a different memory
technology/architecture.. there are of course ways to do that, even today..
it's just that it's not in mainstream desktop technology at the moment...

and the saddest thing is... we haven't even begun to tap the potential of
multi-core computing yet.. and we're already bumping up against limits of
multi-core hardware.. the software just hasn't caught up to it yet..
hopefully, this means that the hardware will stay stable for a while..
unlikely though, seeing that we've got a war going on..