[Xantar]

From what I understand, individual chips are starting to top out. There's a limit to how much smaller you can make transistors, and sooner or later the law of diminishing returns is going to go into effect. So lots of computers are going multi-processor (or multi-core). It's also true of consoles. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 both use multiple processors to achieve their gains.

So I'd say no, it's not a fad. Developers are getting really annoyed because writing code for those machines is complicated, but by and large they don't seem to think it's going away.

On the other hand, a dual-core computer won't help your gaming much yet. It might let you run other programs at the same time as your game, but that's about it.