For the same amount of money as you'd spend on a dual-core CPU, you could get a single-core CPU that runs 99% of todays games much faster - so why would you want a dual-core?

Herb Sutter, one of the software architects at Microsoft, gave a speech yesterday at the In-Stat/MDR Fall Processor Forum. He started off by telling the crowd of hardware engineers, "I come from the world of software, and we need to talk".

He then went on to talk about how the "free ride" for software developers was over. That is, the days of coding for a single core CPU architecture, were coming to a close and that software developers needed to start training and thinking about how to code efficiently and take advantage of multi core CPUs.

Single core CPUs have basically reached the fastest speeds they can go, or at least their development has slowed considerably in recent times. This is the reason multi core CPUs have been released.