[pron]

Main author of Quasar here. The big question is what do "the majority of applications" tell us? A lot of applications run on virtualized hardware, which basically runs a few Pentiums on a single i7 box. So "the majority of applications" don't really need more than a Pentium. But is that really by choice? Or is that simply because modern hardware is so much harder to fully exploit, so we just don't bother and lower expectations? I think it is the latter. If we make it easier to fully take advantage of modern hardware (its processor and memory architecture, its IO/processing latency ratio etc.) then all of a sudden you'll see how most applications actually need every inch of performance they can get their hands on.