You could hide the stupidity with transistors (desktop CPUs), but it's not clear that you can ever hide it without paying a price in power.
By 2005, semiconductor technology allowed dual high-end desktop CPUs CMP chips to be manufactured in volume.
I had brought this up at one point with regard to using the vector registers on desktop CPUs like the G4 as a means of writing a fast software renderer.
Intel needs competitors, and in desktop CPUs they wouldn't have one without AMD.
Despite their capabilities, desktop CPUs are slower at cracking passwords than purpose-built password breaking machines.
Unlike a Cell processor, such desktop CPUs are more suited to the general purpose software usually run on personal computers.
Some manufacturers work around this performance problem by using desktop CPUs for laptops.
The desktop CPUs now all have four non-SMT cores (like the i5-750), with the exception of the i5-2390T.
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first dual-core desktop CPU designed by AMD.
Also at least my current iMac seems to use a desktop CPU, I don't think there are any 3.6 GHz mobile core i5s.