Individual programs that use lots of cores is good, but the fact is that even if there were 0 programs that used more than 1 core, users of computers use more than one program. Want to listen to music, surf the internet, and convert a video file while at the same time you computer is running anti virus software, defragging the hard drive, and monitoring your stock portfolio? Good luck getting it all to run smoothly on a single core processor.
Now days, there are lots of programs that use many cores. Some use two, some 4, and others seem limited only by the computer's number of cores. Now, take the above situation of lots of programs running at the same time, all using more than one core, and you would very likely want to have more than 2,3 or 4 cores, maybe 6 would be good, maybe 8 even.
I recently got an i7 920, and it has 4 cores that are divided into two threads each. That gives me 8 cores to distribute. The game I play, I like to have 6 instances running at the same time, it is an online game, and this gives me the ability to have a toon in town to check prices, a toon at the arena for betting, a toon in the fishing area fishing, and a main toon where I do all the adventuring. I then have two more toons that are slowly building an alternate guild. My old computer was a Q6600 with 4 cores, and I had to double up several game threads onto one core and all four cores would be almost fully saturated running the game. With my new computer, I can have two threads for my main adventure instance and 1 thread for each of the others and still have 1 thread clean for things like, internet, antivirus, mouse and keyboard programs. As it stands now, none of the hyperthreaded virtual threads is saturated, overall the processor rarely hits 60% usage and the game runs much smoother than it has ever run, and this is most noticible in the high density areas of cities, where it took 45 seconds to get moving after teleporting into a city before, now it is more like 5 to 10, and once I start moving, it does not lag for more than half seconds where it used to be 10 or more seconds at a time.
More cores is always good, and while I want high speed cores, it seems to me that the current i7 processors are accomplishing what I need today with total ease. I was totally skeptical about how much better i7 would be, but when my motherboard fried, I needed a new computer, and I had been forced to lower the overclock on my q6600, so I knew it was only a matter of time before it burned out, so I took the plunge and spent the extra cash. It seems well worth it to me.
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