kinggremlin :
Steam hardware survey says about 1% of users have a single core CPU and those are probably netbooks or some other mobile device.
Not even. The original Atom was hyperthreaded, and all Silvermont's were at least dual-core. So, either these folks are using ancient Core 2 Solo's (or, worse yet, P4's) or they're using VMs with only 1 core allocated.
kinggremlin :
Look what happened to multiGPU gaming.
Kinda apples and oranges, there.
kinggremlin :
Waiting for developers to code mainstream software to take advantage of 6+ cores is like waiting for Linux to take over the PC desktop 15 years ago. Every year this was the year, and it never ended up happening.
It doesn't happen overnight, although (the Linux-based) ChromeOS could potentially snap up a significant market share, in a hurry.
But stuff has gradually gotten better at using more cores, and software tech is continually evolving. Check out these benchies:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-corecount-debate/4
Kinda old, but shows pretty good multi-core scaling.
Anyway, I think you both have a point. Multithreaded CPUs have dominated the mainstream since about 2006, which has given developers plenty of incentive to thread their code. But there's a qualitative difference between the mainstream having 2, 8, and 16 threads.
Anywhere from 2 to about 8 can easily be addressed using conventional multithreading techniques with existing languages. But, as hardware thread count climbs into the double-digits, ever more types of tasks and workloads need a fundamental reworking to achieve good utilization. And that means adopting different software tools & tech, which developers are often slow to do.