For many years now the computer processor industry has been moving away from simply making faster cpus and instead has been focusing on making them more parallel.
Instead of having one super fast cpu you can put lots of less powerful cpus (or cores) on one chip that combined can outperform a faster cpu at a lower cost to performance ratio. Although two, four, or even eight core cpus are fairly common, but in a recent announcement Intel tells us to prepare for thousands of cores.
Achieving thousand core designs would represent a tremendous improvement in computing performance and would put mankind well on its way to achieving the kind of computing capacity that would lead us to the singularity.