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Caches.

Xeons and the like dedicate much of their transistor budgets towards larger caches.

If you take that budget for caches and put it towards more execution units, you get the equivalent of Xeon Phi which is a lot of Pentiums built on today's fabrication processes.

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With the normal Intel Core CPUs, they seem to often have a huge amount of their chip area / transistors taken up by integrated graphics. Which could be a bit depressing if someone gets one and doesn't use the IGP.

IT seems to me a lot more enthusiast desktops are using xeon processors instead of cores, this being one of the reasons people are making the swap- you gain a lot of performance/$$ because loosing integrated graphics saves a fair amount of money. The average user still needs integrated graphics though, so I don't see the core ever going away. Who knows though, they might come out with some enthusiast grade core processors that don't have int graphics.

Hopefully said enthusiasts take the opportunity to now use ECC RAM! It's rather hostile that the consumer lines are fenced out from correctness-promoting technology.

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