I think the general (IT level) programmer community doesn't require more processing power to do their jobs than they would have had on a single core desktop in 1999, anyhow.
It may be true that programmers don't strictly require the power, but interesting things become possible when you can afford to waste a lot of power. This should be evident by looking at Rails etc. In another 10 years who knows what will be possible by wasting another 100x processing power?
I don't think you could have comfortably done Rails dev on the typical 1999 workstation.