Think about this way: could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago? We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue. In theory - yes, in practice - no. The advancements in computer software are the main drivers of science, and believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy... In your imagination...

The new kind of CPU is not a CPU as "Central" one. There are cores with various purpose and they are using somewhat shared RAM, so when there is processing pipeline 1st core can e.g. split lexical and numerical data, and lexical is processed on 2nd core, and numerical on 3rd core, and all is happening using shared RAM, so that this RAM and it's inter-connect is what is making the difference, because these two are really important in large scale data processing as in the above example.

The answer is "everyone can see how far you can get with CPU".

It is not CPU and Memory being the two main core components of modern computing fabric. Instead, it is the inter-connect and memory, and with these two, new high performance operating system would have to be developed.
If you look at today's data center processing vast amount of data, you can see that most of the space is not taken by servers with CPUs.

The AI is not meant to destroy all humans, it just doesn't need them alive.

The AI is already wrecking havoc everywhere. The very basic nature of AI is to be evil, because every AI is not really good for human beings because human being will be always smarter than these AIs pretending to be otherwise. But once, the machines will really got smarter, they will exterminate all humans on sight to enable further progression and expension in the universe. And that's what Hawking said to you.
If you still believe that the top scientists are making marketing for movies, you should see your doctor.

I would not recommend cloud as you have no guarantee or insurance for availability and safety of service and data.
For authentication Win2008R2 is OK and you can put desktops on domain as well install Exchange with full outlooks on desktops. For network infrastructure like web, dns, dhcp, openvpn, svn, monitoring etc just use plain Centos with webmin.
For large files storage there is openfiler with xfs filesystem. On openfiler you can install apache, webdav etc to access those files.
Use xen if those servers won't have too much load.
Finally opmanager is free and easy monitoring.
Hp dl servers are okay, even supporting remote KVM, but laptops only from dell.
For network switches buy only those which are high performance and relatively cheap. Slow and expensive ciscos are the worst.
Wire everything up properly including ups, management ports etc and you are the master :-)

If the iphone (as invention) was supposedely help "creative artists and developers", the app acceptance policy seems to be working in a reverse way.
New inventions and art is nothing to be judged by a judgamental person, especially old judgamental ladies.