For the time being, adding more cores isn't going to improve the situation for most tasks. It does well with stuff like graphics editing and some music software, as well as 3D stuff. Some video encoders will alsp distribute accross cpu cores, too, at I guess some loss in encoding quality. Intel is totally kicking ass in per-core performance.

I tthink for us to see any real improvement beyond individual core performance, we'll probably haave to see a whole new architecture, possibly specialized for parallel operations, or possibly a more standard system of processors that would be similar to shaders, but not tied to some shitty graphics driver and completely black-boxed. Or maybe even FPGA type units to build DSPs and whatnot.

It'd still be for pretty specialized operations. We will need to work on making an individual unit very fast because there are some operations that just won't parallelize (unless synchronization can be perfected). This includes adding more instructions like they have been doing that can perform common tasks quickly. Seems kind of unsettling, though. For much more advancement, either compilers will have to become impossibly smart, or assembly language programming will get much more important. A lot of the real world tasks you see where some new cpu kicks ass in performance tend to be those where they made extensive use of SSE or something.

Anyway, I'm going on about stuff I only vaguely know about. I just don't think the "more and more cores" trend will bear fruit for much longer.

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Dual core not recommended for every day use? That's retarded. Dual core is plenty for the majority of people, even gamers, really. Also, virtual machine can't really test hardware problems, since it's a virtual machine. And all the crap you mentioned would be plenty fine on a quad core or even a fast dual core.

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Well, the issue is there are only some tasks that can really benefit from parallelization. Many others need too much synchronization or depend on a large data set at any time, making sharing data difficult. Most you will run in to a lot of overhead and end up being slower or get very little improvement. Dual core is useful because you can avoid issues with 1 core chugging away at something and losing system responsiveness. Beyond 2 cores, you're limited mostly to seeing benefits in big number crunching processes which require little to no synchronization or a reasonably small shared set of data. Stuff like x264 is pretty ridiculously engineered but even for that, threading is a compromise.

Currently, I think increasing core counts is just marketing nonsense. It's something the majority of people buying these things (gamers) won't see much benefit from. As end-user type applications go, it'd probably mostly only benefit those who do video editing if the program is capable of efficiently threading effects. Audio might too, but it's usually at a cost of latency, which I guess is a bigger deal for audio than video editing. Blender and probably other 3D rendering programs aree "embarrassingly" threadable, since it's a relatively small and fixed shared data set. Of course, servers and other such large, multi-user systems really benefit. AMD's 8 core chips would probably do fantastically in a server. However not sure how well they'd benefit in x264, which I believe makes decent use of SSE and I'm not sure what SSE level AMD chips are capable of. Last I heard was 2. It would be nice if AMD would catch up with intel with a lot of stuff, like individual core performance and SIMD extensions. Trying to cram more and moree cores in seems to be more like struggling to market something because they can't seem to get their stuff up to par, which is really unfortunate.

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Heh, in 2000 you would've seen almost no benefit at all if you were just doing desktop stuff. :p Well, 2 cores would always be generally useful since things can at least be split between OS/environment and applications, so you won't lose responsiveness like you do with a single core system.

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