AMD Magny-Cours 12-Core CPU in 2010

People are getting excited by AMD 12-core plans. Along with this new CPU, a new CPU socket named G34 will appear. Fair enough, at some point one has to add more pins to transport more data (hopefully faster). The downside is that you will have to get a new motherboard. 12 cores in two years seem reasonable – no surprises here. The question is: what’s going to use these cores? Certainly not the average application, because they can’t take advantage of many-cores. Even games won’t fully use this parallelism: the really parallel stuff (physics, video compression) will go to GPUs, which might have more than 1000 cores by then. I’m upgrading my PC and I would rather go with a high-frequency dual-core than a lower frequency quad-core. If you own a quad-core PC, open the task manager, go to the “performance” tab and entertain yourself watching the cores not doing much. That is – unless you use a parallel app that won’t be GPU accelerated soon.