Number of cores is just another metric to optimize for. What counts in the end is whether it can efficiently and quickly deal with the load it is expected to ha

Number of cores is just another metric to optimize for. What counts in the end is whether it can efficiently and quickly deal with the load it is expected to handle. Many cores are great for mostly independent tasks, but performance will suffer as soon as communication is required. Making chip architectures more distributed seems to be the state of the art at the moment, but this doesn't mean we will suddenly be able to escape Amdahl's Law. To be specific, for inherently serial applications where we are absolutely interested in getting the result ASAP, single-thread performance remains crucial.