Indeed, the rising trend today is to try and distribute the work into multiple processes, which don't even need to be of the same type(it could be CPU,GPU,etc...). Assuming of course the problem can be parallelized sufficiently, which isn't always so. Graphics programming, which is my hobby, lends itself very easily to parallelizing. IMO, more robust and safer concurrent programming languages and systems would be of greater benefit than further advances in component size. In many places in the software world, concurrent programming is still a bit of hell, with what the stupid stuff you have to deal when sharing state(especially with threads). Mainstream languages don't really excel at this. We need a way to streamline this stuff better.

Interesting relevant tweet from Carmack: (http://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack)

"It is sort of depressing when it becomes clear that it is more effective to do crappy parallel work than good sequential work."