Intel Corp (INTC)

[Tim May]

"can get really good performance by stuffing 20 of them together"

I can't tell if you're being facetious or not, but Seymour Cray once said something along the lines of "Which would you rather have, two oxen pulling a cart or 50 rabbits trying to pull it?"

Even on my Core i7 with 4 cores, very few tasks can make use of even 2 cores. Some apps like Final Cut Pro have been optimized to make use of 4, 6, or more cores, but this is a highly-parallelizable app. (( assume similar optimization has happened for some other apps.)

Understand, I don't doubt that the long-term future (several years out) is for many-core processing. We all know about several approaches, from explicit parallelization, to Grand Central Dispatch (IIRC), to functional programming and actor-based programming a a Haskell, Scala, Erlang, and Clojure. And several other schemes.

But I doubt any app developers are putting much effort into rewriting C# or Java apps on the RT to make use of multiple cores. They probably would if the RT was a top-seller, but it appears to have a limited lifetime ahead of it.

(And even ARM server boxes are slow in arriving or at least in gaining market traction.)

-Tim