You're completely wrong with your analogy. If you had the most basic understand of how a modern multitasking OSkernel operates, from Linux to Windows to Mac OS X, you'd understand why your statement is completely wrong.
You cannot liken cores to adding additional "horsepower" to a computer, nor can you liken additional cores to ANY sort of linear performance gain metric. You cannot compare a CPU to an engine. THAT is comparing "apples to oranges". An engine produces force to operate the drivetrain. A CPU is a decision-making calcuator, intepreting instructions and performing operations on those instructions to change register states and memory states.
There's hundreds of factors involved in how additional processing power scales on a CPU. Things like the length of the pipeline, the amount of L1 cache available, the failure rate of instruction prediction, the cost of a failed instruction, et cetera. Even in true multi-threaded applications, there's no guarantee that you're going to see a linear increase in performance just by adding additional cores. Ultimately each individual CPU is going to share resources with other parts of the system, and this includes interaction with the OS.
And not to mention we are dealing with hardware and software in 2008, not 2015 or 2020. For the overwhelming majority of applications and games available today, there will be little to no benefit in seeking more cores with a lowered clockspeed over a smaller number of cores with a substantially higher clockspeed. Unless someone can truly justify the need for a quad-core system, such as a multi-threaded CAD applications, it's much easier to justify saving money on a dual-core CPU.
Yes, processors with dozens or even hundreds of "cores" is the future. You're 100% wrong as to why and as to how.
