The start of the core race :



Earlier the processors from both Intel and AMD used to be rated based on the clock speeds.The higher the clock speed,the better.While this strategy has been very simple both on hardware and software terms,the heat,energy and size factors have been a major impact on the increase on the clock speeds.

This has started with dual cores and now the quads and octals in the near future.And some intermediate ones such as tri cores have also been launched.This approach requires the software side to support multiple threads so as to scale accordingly with the number of cores and make efficient use of the available resources.

But even now the number of applications that make use of 2 cores is negligible,let alone quad and octal cores.While AMD had spoke about reverse hyperthreading where many cores appear as a single core,it hasnt implemented much in this field.

We are seeing a similar scenario in the GPU market where games fail to utilize more than one GPU efficiently.So this is where the software market has to make up for the performance enhancements.