I am not sure the 1000s or cores in a desktop machine principle is realistic. This seems like just taking the the current core count increase as being able to keep going up forever. It seems like a casual assumption was also made about processor clock rate until that hit its practical limit about 2003. From what I read it is expected to be unlikely that manufacturing processes can shrink bellow 16 nanometers. With mainstream processors already being produced at 32 nanometers it seems like it may only be 2 die shrink generations till we reach that limit. If a processor can be manufactured today with 8 cores on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process then at 16 nanometers the same processor should fit into more or less a quarter of the size. That would give 32 cores. If a processor today can be manufactured with more simple cores say 32 of them then at 16 nanometers there would be 128 cores. If 64 cores today then that becomes 256. This brings us to between tens of cores to a couple of hundred or so depending on the complexity of each core. The idea of thousands of cores for a client machine at least may not be realistic. The trend is also now to combine CPU and GPU on a single die. The GPU is generally larger than the CPU so such combined processors would have to sacrifice processing cores for GPU cores or other items integrated on the die. In practice 3-4Ghz ended up being a limit. If 16 nanometer ends up being a practical limit too then there comes a cut of point after which more cores cannot be added. This too in the foreseeable future. Perhaps it will be possible to go bellow 16 nanometers but fundamentally the size of atoms is fixed meaning there is a limit to how small things can be shrunk. Increasing the size of the die increases heat, power consumption and potential for timer signal latency issues so there are limits on expanding that way too.
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