Quad-core chips will return disappointing sales results

Seeing how my first two predictions were fairly safe, I'm going to go out on a limb here and throw in my two cents on the core war. Both AMD and Intel are gearing up for 2007 to be the year of four cores but if you ask me, it's not gonna happen. Both companies saw dual-core parts move huge numbers this past year but I doubt they'll be able to duplicate that success with quad-core chips. It's going to be a few more months until we start seeing the first "native" quad-core chips (with all four cores on one die) and when they finally do debut, they'll be prohibitively expensive. And without a 64-bit OS and multithreaded apps, most users won't be able to reap the full benefits of four cores. Sure, quad-core chipsets will have their place--in x86 servers and high-end graphics workstations, for example--but they won't make the same mass-market splash that dual-core chips did.