I was coming to my own conclusions about the siren song of multi core CPU's and was surprised to find that I was not alone. That can sometimes be a sign that you are not whistling in the wind.
I was particularly interested when I found Donald Knuth, the infamous computer science professor from Stanford University, grinding his own axe regarding multi-core CPUs. The following is extracted from this interesting interview.
I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific-- until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.Some additional links: All this tends to confirm my thinking that a dual core CPU hits the mark for most uses. Another angle on all this is that a lot of processing that people care about is being handled by the graphics processor these days.Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.