Personally, I interpreted the comment on the CPU differently than most people ...
If you've paid attention to any major chip architecture over the decades you will have noticed that they're constantly adding instructions to improve performance for particular applications, they rarely/never eliminate instructions, and most of these instructions are not related to gaming. As a result, the core instruction set to produce a good gaming system is relatively small and the silicon needed to support it isn't that large.
Hypothetically speaking, if you know you have a dedicated sound chip that can decode audio files, and you know you have a dedicated GPU that can decode video files, do you really need the multi-media extensions on your CPU to perform these tasks? If you can reduce the chip size by 10% would you remove these extensions?
While my single hypothetical may not seem that meaningful, if you can make several choices which are similar you could (in theory) dramatically reduce the size of your chip without impacting performance in your given application.
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