Multi core are often under used after 4 cores maximum. It's easy to put 4 or 8 core, when you have done the job for 2. But, it's very hard for a programm to correctly use it. Good isa could avoid to use complexe technique to have out of order cost for performance. In the futur, the way to go, i think is buldozer like technologies, it's like intel multithreading but with more ALU. You could imagine a see of operators, how many register bank than there is cores, and one big memory controller.
I disagree, I work for quite old fashoned branch (Telecoms) and we have no problems of using fully 10-20 cores with parallel code. Even the very old telecoms code had pretty good locking regimes and can be parallelized with some work. Yes there are hard problems like splitting single protocols into multiple cores, but things progress.
The reality is that the paradigm is shifting to multicore, and very massive multicore. The ones who miss the boat will have problems. Current ARM SoC generation has max 16 cores, the next one is 32-48 and you can guess after that.
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