…people are now willing to make trade-offs against performance. For the entire history of the PC industry, computers have been too slow, so trade-offs were made in favor of faster CPUs: higher prices and heavier laptops. But today, for many common tasks, the type of CPU you get when you build a $400 lightweight laptop is fast enough. That’s (a) breakthrough.
Cynically I also wonder if this is because “more cores” isn’t as compelling as faster. As Hank Williams says,
The problem of multi-core computing is really very simple. As most of us have experienced, every problem *can’t* be solved better or faster with more people. Some problems can be solved faster by adding a few people, but most problems cannot. In truth, most problems can best, or only be solved by one person at a time. And so it is with computing. The vast majority of problems can only be solved by one logic thread at a time. The reason is obvious. For most process-oriented work, step B is based on the results of step A. And step C is based on the results of step B, and so on.