I'm certainly not going to argue against GPUs (or FPGAs) being used in scientific applications where performance is limited by floating point or vector performance. In certain scientific applications they can hand general-purpose CPUs their butts. I'm talking about ARM/RISC vs x86 CPUs for server applications.

Sorry, I went on a tangent there. The benefits of wimpy cores have certainly been elusive. Some good links http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/trishulc/paper... http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...