Smartphones are not the only computer hardware that is evolving quickly...
For less than $5000 it is possible to buy a quad-CPU server, and 4 x 16 core AMD CPUs.
Microsoft has figured this out and SQL 2012 price depends on number of CPU cores.
I guess that Azure, AWS, GAE, iCloud, must be leveraging hardware like this heavily...
Even more interesting than CPU cores is max memory. 512 GB is a lot.
Most database are smaller than that. And in-memory processing is very fast.
