You can already get 7940HS mini PCs

There is very little demand for a powerful iGPU desktop chip

There was little demand. Things change.

In the sense that we take having 6 or 8 cores for granted

Shout out the the Duron line. Suddenly we could get decent a FPU without paying the Intel tax, and that mattered to me back then because I sure did not have a lot of spare cash.

My Duron 900 was a heck of an upgrade from the old K6-400. It lasted me until the Athlon 2500+ provided a similar incredible performance hike at a very forgiving price.

Pretty much what one would expect from a ~22% increase in GPU clock speed, I guess.