The way that the whole industry is moving, the more cores are going to be utilized. Obviously. It need not to be just for video rendering or folding.

Even Tim Sweeney is thinking back about software rendering - which have consistent output across display card. Even GPU is moving to multi-core + general purpose. So having 'software' rendering entirely in CPU or GPU might happen sooner.


I often max out a dual-core when testing multi-threaded programs on both host and wmware-ed environment. By that time, the whole response were sluggish.

The most suitable CPU right now should be those have the most cores as well as a good power-saving performance-on-demand features.

A trend on the web is that, javascript is getting the spotlight, and should the js vm making good use of threads... quad cores might be needed. You can try on website with full animation on js it could choke the entire browser but too bad it just utilizes 1 cores.

Other than that, well most 'office' task even a single core is enough.