At the beginning of the decade, Intel was imagining that by 2010 it would have processors with over 1 billion transistors running at a clock speed of 20GHz. As we move into the second half of 2009, the reality is that we will soon have 3GHz mobile chips with four cores on them and 2010 will likely see 4GHz desktop chips with six and eight cores. Ultra-fast processors running at clock speeds over 4GHz have just been too expensive to power — and to cool off. So the other solution is to have more p