Are we only moving toward multi-core CPUs because we have to?

[atom]

We would have moved to multi threaded apps regardless of how CPU architecture has progressed and we would have moved to dual core processors regardless of CPU scalability. Multi threaded application development has been progressing for years and years now it was really only inevitable it would trickle down from professional level applications to more home user level applications. It's also the reason why we would have had dual core procs. no matter how any of the recent architectures scaled. If netburst scaled to 8 ghz or whatever it was supposed to scale to we would have had 8ghz dual cores.........

Originally posted by: archcommus In other words, would, say, a single core 20 GHz processor using conventional single-threaded programming be PREFERABLE to a multiple core system using many threads?

Thats kind of a loaded question because if we had a single core 20ghz processor there would be the technology to have two or more 20ghz processors (whether it be two acutal processors on a dual proc motherboard or a dual core chip) so multithreaded would still be preferred.

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: atom
We would have moved to multi threaded apps regardless of how CPU architecture has progressed and we would have moved to dual core processors regardless of CPU scalability. Multi threaded application development has been progressing for years and years now it was really only inevitable it would trickle down from professional level applications to more home user level applications. It's also the reason why we would have had dual core procs. no matter how any of the recent architectures scaled. If netburst scaled to 8 ghz or whatever it was supposed to scale to we would have had 8ghz dual cores.........

Originally posted by: archcommus In other words, would, say, a single core 20 GHz processor using conventional single-threaded programming be PREFERABLE to a multiple core system using many threads?

Thats kind of a loaded question because if we had a single core 20ghz processor there would be the technology to have two or more 20ghz processors (whether it be two acutal processors on a dual proc motherboard or a dual core chip) so multithreaded would still be preferred.

Makes sense. So this is a justified move regardless of clock speed potential. If both continue to increase, we could very well have 16 cores on a chip each running at 20 GHz and have the potential to break applications into many pieces each finishing at incredible speeds.