As a developer I haven't hit the point where I can have too many cores. When I can run three or six VMs (linux server), each allocated 2 cores (hyperthreaded ones are ok) and at least 1GB RAM each, while simultaneously abusing my browser with too many tabs, with cycles to spare for big desktop apps (Gimp, LibreOffice, etc), then I won't care so much about cores anymore.
That's possible on high-end machines, but I'm looking forward to mid-level laptops being able to do that too.
I do agree that a lot of performance will come from better coding, though. I can see that in my Linksys WRT54GL router, which is 2004 hardware that runs better than most everything else available today, thanks in large part to 8 years of open source software evolution in the firmware.
When software has time to evolve and mature on stable hardware, it's really cool to see the performance that can be weened out of even old hardware.
I don't know what you're running on all those VM's but I very rarely have more than one or two cpu's utilized at once even though I have some VM's running.
Sure, a lot of cores doesn't hurt, but usually they don't help either.
You can locally simulate a multi-server production environment. So dev is your local machine, test/staging are the VMs (web, app, db server, etc) on your machine, prod is in the cloud somewhere. Nice for freelancers who work on the go without a corporate server farm.
> but I very rarely have more than one or two cpu's utilized at once
That's possible on high-end machines, but I'm looking forward to mid-level laptops being able to do that too.
I do agree that a lot of performance will come from better coding, though. I can see that in my Linksys WRT54GL router, which is 2004 hardware that runs better than most everything else available today, thanks in large part to 8 years of open source software evolution in the firmware.
When software has time to evolve and mature on stable hardware, it's really cool to see the performance that can be weened out of even old hardware.