Is the general purpose cpu obsolete?

Jan 24, 2005
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It seems like there is a trend to move away from a single dedicated cpu running that processes all the tasks on a computer. Obviously we now have gpus, sound cards, and hardware firewalls (to name a few). These things take the work away from the cpu to free it up to do other things. Is this trend going to continue successfully? Multi-cores, ppus, math co-processors, and ai co-processors are in the works for the home pc. Does this technique of adding more specialized processors have a practical limit? What are the advantages and disadvantages of specialized processing in the pc?