I don't understand the resistance I saw in the article. I say bring it on: 64 cores is great. Cost isn't an issue because everything trickles down eventually.
Modern operating systems have plenty of things to do with multiple cores. Just having extra cores and running multiple single-threaded applications makes for a smoother experience. With actual multithreading, eg compiling, graphics rendering things trivially get better. That was certainly the case going from 4 to 16 using a 1950x when I upgraded my desktop.
The real limit will probably become bandwidth to keep all those cores humming at full speed. I can easily see a future where we'll routinely expect some cores to be io or ram limited and that particular performance tradeoff will be commonly known to non-technical people. (Not just CS, dev / ops datacenter types).
This kind of tradeoff is already in the current 32 core offering AFAIK.
Very awesome, but a bit outside my budget considerations... right now, looking at about $3500 for a 3950X build, and that's about my max on this. If they do a 32 core for $1200 or so, might be able to swing that.
No. That was one of the main reason behind introducing multi-core architectures. It is getting harder and harder to optimize the CPU cores, neither can you keep pushing the CPU frequency. So the only option is to create multi-core processors and build multi-threaded applications.
