Doesn't really surprise me that multicore support is coming in.
Eventually, Moore's Law is going to fail (you could argue that it already has). You can't have transistors made out of a single atom (can you?). So the logical step is to put them in parallel.
In fact, give the decreasing costs of chips, it's probably becoming more economical to just do what super computer designers have been doing for a long time.
I'm curious what Cell (come on Epiphany...where are you??) is going to bring to the general purpose CPUs (the Pentiums and the Athlons).
Also, speaking with my Dad (the Mac fan), he suspects a special version of the Pentium IV will come out that has 64-bit support, and this is likely why they are saying 2 years before a complete transition to Intel chips is going to be made.
I was curious what they were going to do there, since the G5 has a 64-bit processor in it. And even if the P4 is faster than the 32-bit processors (or even the G5 in some cases), there are still advantages that 64-bit processing can provide that I'm sure people would be angry about if they suddenly disappeared.
I'm also curious about software support. Are those running on older platforms screwed for newer software?