Did you actually read the article? How is it in anyway related to the "five computers" thingy?
The article is talking about an architectural limitation not a business/consumer one.
The point made in this article surrounds current architectures and their limitations. The conclusion that more than 16 cores makes no sense might well be a good conclusion for now, but "more than 16 cores may well be pointless" is by no means a conclusion for the long or even mid term.
Don't you mean usually? I haven't seen the big break throughs in AI that were expected. I haven't seen a solution to the halting problem, etc, etc.
AI hasn't lived up to the promises made a few decades ago.
* 1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."[53]
* 1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[54]
* 1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."[55]
* 1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."[56]
PS: A digital computer is the worlds chess champion or would be if we let them compete. Making a useful captia is hard, but computers don't compose poetry so we can still say we don't have AI.
"they give the anecdotal hint that limitations will ALWAYS be beaten."
Limitations will not always be beaten.
From the article: "But, to my knowledge, these die-stacking schemes are further from down the road than the production of a mass-market processor with greater than 16 cores."
The article is pretty clear that "more then 16 cores may well be pointless" is for now.
In the same way "more than 16 cores is pointless" is a reasonable claim if one presumes that the technical limitations in the article are insurmountable.
Given our past experience, no technological limitation is truly insurmountable.
Therefore, I'm willing to assign as much belief in this article as I am the "five computers" claim.