Reppin the OG i7 920 here as well. It does make my slightly sad knowing the i7-2720M in my work laptop is more than twice as powerful, and even more sad knowing the 3rd Gen i7'* are now out and I don't have one yet.

My question is, when will it stop? Dual cores, quad cores, quad chip motherboards with quad cores. I mean, how much processing power does one need to run BF3? When will we reach the end of the techinical limits of building a computer?

Well we are very close to the silicon limitation, so I suspect very soon we will be at the lowest possible power draw, then it just becomes cores and speed. Speed being maxed out at efficient use around 4GHz, which we are already getting easily, so its then just cores. Without the properly coded software to handle multiple cores and threads they are useless. So really we're waiting for a engineering breakthrough in the hardware with a new processing architecture that changes things dramatically or the software guys to catch up.

Also larger caches will probably be worked on (L4+ maybe as well??)

You need at least a fairly beefy quad core CPU to handle BF3, I have watched my CPU usage as I played with my old Core 2 Quad Q9550 OC'd to 3.8 GHz, and with the CPU I have now OC'd to 4.3 GHz, and the usage is always around 80% or so, the game beats up the processors, but still does not work like they could if we could actually work hyper-threading into gaming, hyper-threading is pretty much useless for most games, which is why I went with the i5-2500k instead of an Ivy Bridge CPU, I do mildly regret my choice as I could have disabled hyper-threading, and had PCI-E 3.0 support, which my mobo and EVGA GTX 680 SC support, I doubt I see any real fps loss, since I highly doubt the data is being maxed out passed the limitations of the PCI-E 2.0 BUS.

I could have went with a lot less power with my build, but I really wanted to be able to play my games like BF3, Civ V, and Crysis 3 on when it releases, I wanted to be able to run the games om the highest settings, minus high AA and AF settings, and still maintain 70-100 FPS at all times. :o

As for the architecture of the chips, I think the Ivy bridge at 22nm is our limits for now, if the chips get any smaller I don't see them being able to produce as much power without causing excess unwanted heat.

i could care less about games, the cool thing to me is the internet speeds and how small a full power laptop is. ive got a good desktop but my wife uses it shes a teacher. ive got wireless n and a new dell w/ i7. shes got a toshiba laptop now and a wireless printer so mostly we sit in the living room.

Well you probably don't have a couple thousand invested in just games itself either

id rather go play with my car or atv