New
#10
Wel as they said, specialized FPGA hardware (including hardware to do MPEG encoding/decoding) has been around forever.
I can't really see an advantage to any desktop to have to program it's cpu cores for every single task you might want to run on it at any one time. And really only specilized and wel contained tasks LIKE video encoding can really take advantage of this. Though you could maybe have photoshop program every single one of it's installed filters into a seperate core on launch. Just in case you might want to use one?
Some of this is actually being done right now in CS5 and much more so in CS6 using your GPU which already has dozens or hundreds of graphics oriented cores on it right now.
I would think that you would still need a healthy set of general purpose cores with a satellite of speciality cores that could be programmed on launch of a process for those very few well contained in/out transform processes at best.