the 'evolutionary approach to parallel hardware and software may work from 2- or 8-processor systems, but is likely to face diminishing returns as 16 and 32 processor systems are realized'

I saw Patterson give this talk at PARC. While he did say something similar to the above quote, he was NOT suggesting that fewer, more powerful processors is the future (which is the impression I got from the summary). In fact, the entire talk was to the opposite point. Parallelism is the future; the processor is the new transistor; processors will have thousands of cores, etc. Very fascinating stuff. I hope more researchers participate and use his emulation system, because I think he's correct (as he has been in the past) that we will need to adopt parallelism more in the future.