In order to utilize those increased cores, though, developers will need to write code that can take advantage of them. Is there any indication of that happenin

In order to utilize those increased cores, though, developers will need to write code that can take advantage of them. Is there any indication of that happening? That's the second angle on this - even though writing parallel/concurrent code might in theory improve performance, it won't help if people continue to write single-threaded applications for everything except IO/Graphics. I.E. It might be still more useful to build bigger 4-core processors, simply because all the developers and code out there are designed to take advantage of them - and a theoretically better 6-core processor would just end up with 2-3 cores always idling.