Intel: People Do Not Need High-Performance Graphics
 

A highly-ranking executive of Intel Corp. said in an interview that the vast majority of customers hardly need high performance graphics. While it is clear that by far not everyone plays video games, the claim still reminds the phrase about 640 kilobytes of RAM being enough for everyone.

“When people think about graphics, they think about 3D war games and more realism. I'm not going to dismiss this, but (this market) attracts a relatively small amount of people. I think what a significant portion of consumers really want is media,” said Intel executive vice president Dadi Perlmutter, in an interview with Cnet News.com web-site.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis..._Graphics.html

correct if all you do is 2D apps.
gamers on the other hand require high end GPU.

then why do we need 4, 6, or 8 cores? if it wasn't for games a P3 1G would do nicely for most apps

?
very few games are multithreaded, majority can hardly deal with dual core, let alone quad core.

I thought that the multithreading was done by the OS, XP and newer was written to enable multi core threading, there were several games that were bottle necked by slow processors, if that's the case a single core 4Ghz processor is all we need

exactly, you'll notice that 99% of games out there will run buttersmooth with a single core 4ghz CPU (Core tech of course, not P4;))

I would much rather see advances in Mhz then cores; a 6ghz Core 2 Duo would be faster in games and daily CPU usage compared to the latest 3.3ghz 6-core Core i7, for example. Only in heavily multithreaded rendering etc will the extra cores pay off.

The Intel guy's correct. He said "consumers" and not "enthusiasts" and the majority of normal PC users don't need fancy graphics - onboard will meet their limited needs just fine.

Indeed, in most offices you only need a simple onboard GPU. At home, most people don't need fancy graphics either, most kids and elderly people are fine with a simple graphics card.
Intel of course don't tell use this for no reason, they just want the people to understand why there isn't a problem when buying a high-end cpu with built-in graphics. If they'd tell use the opposite, nobody would by their stuff anymore :D

@N°13: Intel realised that and introduced it's Turboboost technology so you have more Hz when you're only using one or two cores.