Intel To Demo Octo-Core CPU Comments

@The number of situation in which that kind of number crunching power would ever be needed are understandably limited.

Well, most applications nowadays are making support for multi-core, including games, video encoding etc. Even the OS can eat threads like no tommorow. Having 32 threads doing a H264 encode would be very nice.

meh, and we all though the numbers war was over when the GHz battles ended with the P4...
Personally I won't be content until Intel offers a 76.3 core chip.

I think that pretty soon we're going to see languages and frameworks that allow programmers to make multi-threaded programmes without really needing to think about it - at which point it will be a case of the more threads the better. For instance, locating an object in a list or sorting a list could both be done in a multi-threaded manner transparently to the programmer, I'd have thought.

Quite apart from that, it's easy to imagine a case where a game programmer assigns a thread to each AI characters decision making, for instance, so you could easily have 20 or 30 concurrent threads going.

the other application is vm farms, you should be able to get more vm's per server/blade.

So let's have a sweepstakes on what they'll call this (eventual) hi-end technology, Core i8?