In the world of microprocessors, there’s little question as to who’s the top dog. So when Intel, the 8000 lb. gorilla of the CPU world, makes a move, it’s usually indicative of a larger trend in the industry. The company has announced that starting in the first quarter of 2008, it will begin phasing out the manufacturing of single-core CPUs. The company currently plans to bring dual-core processors to even its Celeron line of budget chips ($34-59), so clearly, there’s little room left for the traditional single-core CPU. Undoubtedly, this marks the beginning of the end for the single-core chip and as Ars Technica duly notes, that’s a good thing, since it will only force software developers to write more multithreaded applications. Intel’s first dual-core Celeron, the 1.6Ghz E1200, will arrive in Q1 2008 for a price of $53 (when ordered in quantities of 1,000 or more). 

So long single-core, we hardly knew ye:
– see this Ars Technica article