I was interested to read that the cores of Intel's new Larrabee graphics architecture are based on the old P54C design, originally used in the second generation of Pentium chips (dating back to before even MMX made its first appearance). The core has since been updated with the latest instructions (including x86-64) but is missing performance features such as out-of-order execution. This vindicates what I wrote in devolving the CPU - that individual cores will get simpler and slower again as they get more numerous.