128 core CPUs are irrelevant, start getting used to things not getting faster? Wrong answer!

Some things, like graphics, are natural things to parallelize. Your dealing with multiple
tiles in a mpeg video or some number of discrete mathematical functions be used over and over
again on a large number of 3D objects or whatnot. 


then there are other things, like imagemagick you mentioned, that can be setup to run in batch
mode were you have lots of images or calculations to do over and over again on a number of
images or whatnot. With that there probably isn't much need to do any multithreading.. Just
fork it for how many images your working on. Batch programming at it's best.

Even for static renderings with raytracing this is the way to go.. the multitheaded portion
would be relatively small and then just fork it and stitch the images back together after it's
been rendered. 

For lots of this stuff it would make sense to have to do multithreading if your in a
Windows-only world, but with Linux the overhead of fork is much smaller and leads to simpler
and less buggy programs.

And of course there is multitasking and all that. Even then how many things do you have going
on at once? 3 things? 4 things?  How is that going to translate to big savings when your
dealing with a entry level Dell desktop computer with 8-16 cores?

Do you really want to see something with the complexity of Firefox or OpenOffice.org have it's
code base be refactored to support multi threaded programming? They have a tough enough job
now as it is trying to maintain their code base without all that extra overhead. 

How many programs that you use on a daily basis that could benefit from it?

I did see big benefits from moving from One CPU to Two. I always wanted to do that, but I
couldn't justify the expense of a SMP board and such for home use. 

From Two CPUs to Four will probably see some benefits.

For rendering games and doing other stuff integrating the GPU into the CPU die will help. So
your going to take advantage of maybe another 4 cores. 

If people start doing crazy stuff with raytracing and graphics then I can see taking advantage
of up to 16 cores... Plus it'll make video processing much less buggy since we can hopefully
get away from the proprietary hell that Nvidia and (historically) ATI have driven us into.

I donno. 

Intel and friends are talking about _EIGHTY_ cores. (Maybe they'll use 4-8 for normal tasks
and then the rest for graphics and a few specialized cores for giggles and grins?)


It seems that they want programmers to start using parallel processing on even basic tasks. I
think that this is a tall order given that, in general, software is in a such a lousy state as
it is right now. I mean it's not like even very advanced programmers have perfected single
threaded application programming.