This reminds me of something I read recently about server blade architecture. It's the same general idea, where you have lots of small components doing very specialized tasks. I'm not sure if that would work in the normal desktop world though...being able to specialize componenets implies advance knowledge of what the hardware will actually be doing. For servers that's pretty easy, but the wide variety of desktop applications could make that impractical. Maybe thats why they are still pushing for more all-purpose cores.