I have seen the future, and it has many cores

I recently bought a 3990X TR system. Yes, I do have some uses for all those cores, but it also feels like being a part of history.

After decades of processors primarily competing on single-threaded performance, and core counts typically remaining in the single digits, AMD's 64-core processors - while still not cheap - have put incredible power within reach of the budgets of a large number of people.

And where do they go from here? 128 cores, 256, more? At 512 cores, with SMT the processor will cross the 1,000 thread mark. Perhaps 20 years from now, core counts will be in the tens of thousands, maybe even millions.

Software and programming languages will no longer be able to avoid providing support for multithreading going forward. The multithreaded future is here, and with processors like the 3990X it's very clear what it looks like.