In my opinion the number of cores is kind of a red hering. The actually hard problem is about memory access. A 1000 core system is either NUMA with potentially

In my opinion the number of cores is kind of a red hering. The actually hard problem is about memory access. A 1000 core system is either NUMA with potentially very big latencies or cache-incoherent. The NUMA approach offers backwards compatibility, but dropping cache-coherence provides more flexibility since the memory partitioning can be changed dynamically.