Bah... I've had way more than 8 cores for years!
Oh, wait, you meant inside a single computer, didn't you?
Way back in 1999-2000, I had an 8-core computer. It was an Intel server "OCPRF100", with eight 550 MHz / 2 MB L2 cache Pentium III Xeon chips in it. It was my 'toy' at work. That sucker was worth $10,000 just for the bare server, and another $32,000 for the processors. Of course, I worked for Intel's 'Enterprise Server Group' at the time, so we didn't pay a dime for any of it.
(Well, not entirely true. At the time, Intel charged its other divisions a flat fee of $100 for each piece of equipment. So we got the server for free, because we were the server division, but we did have to pay $100 for each $4000 processor. Likewise, the processor division got the processors for free, but had to pay $100 for the $10,000 server, if they wanted one.)
Once, we even slapped the max 32 GB of RAM in it, just to play with. (Intel didn't get RAM for free, that was on loan from Micron.) We even put a 'workstation' video card in there once that consisted of four PCI cards with their own separate links (similar to the current SLI,) each card containing four Voodoo 3 chips.
Quake 3 Arena was amazingly fast on that system.
That's what we did over Y2K, we played Q3A on a 40 inch plasma screen, since there were no actual Y2K problems, yet Intel management decided that we had to be there "just in case".
This computer just sat on the desk in my cube, usually just doing distributed computing. (I had another 4-way P2Xeon system that I used as my primary 'desktop' computer instead of the IT-department-provided Pentium Pro.)
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