In 5 years the standard number of cores on an x86 CPU will probably be 32 and they will run at 6GHz+ on stock clocks... So it's probably irrelevant
No they won't.
1) Number of cores will increase but it is more like 50% increase every 2 years (track the move from single core to double to quad to hex core). The number of cores isn't going to increase 8x in next 5 years.
2) You won't see a 6GHz+ chip (maybe not ever). Power draw increases by the SQUARE of frequency. So if you double the frequency you don't get 2x the power draw you get 4x the power draw (and 4x the heat). This is the entire reason for multi-core designs. Back in Pentium III days Intel has a long term timeline ... 10Ghz by 2010. We didn't quite make it there.
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-2011-20000726/
Have you noticed that frequency of fast CPU today isn't much faster than 2 years ago, and not significantly faster than 6 years ago. If hypothetically you could make a 6GHz+ chip and say it consumed 240W. You could get the same computational power by redesigning the chip to be more efficient (more instructions per clock aka Pentium IV -> Core 2 -> i7) and more cores and then clock it at ~3GHz and likely end up with ~120W TDP.
Intel was attempting to break the ceiling on speed with the Prescott generation of CPUs by extending the pipeline in the chips -- didn't happen, but AMD is taking the approach again with Bulldozer. AMD wanted 4.5GHz stock clocks on Bulldozer this round but didn't pull it off; however, with the enhanced latencies and huge pipeline future versions of the chip should clock around there. All of Intel's current line easily clocks above 4GHz, with the mean being 4.5GHz. Further, this doesn't represent actual performance gains as new processes evolve that give performance gains without large new numbers of transistors. The point of the post was though: Soon CPUs will be so much faster than even if GPUs improved, they would still be behind.
