Chipmate!
There’s hardly anything sexier than a multicore CPU that I actually know how to program! Better yet, make that a “manycore” CPU.
Dual-core CPUs were cool, and quad-cores even cooler. But they were hardly enough to enable writing real fine-grained parallel programs. Recently Intel released “Core i7″ architecture CPUs, with four cores minimum and they all support HyperThreading, which is at best a hack and not a particularly beautiful one, but it gets the count of available hardware threads to 8, which I’m willing to settle for! (Note that semi-8-core CPUs have been available for some time, but not on desktops, and not in practical price ranges.)
When I think of all the execution units, the 64-bit wide registers, the cache hierarchy… Oooh!
I think they double the cores every once in a while to handle the ever increasing useless processes with MS Windows. At any point in time, one core is left for you to work with.