Is there any way to actually make use of all these 6-8 cores

[David Nation]

Is there any way to actually make use of all these 6-8 cores or are we destined to watch several of them just sit idle?

 

[clutchc]

As mentioned above, it depends what you use your machine for. If it is just a browsing machine, you might as well just have a fast single core. But if you use programs that are heavily multi threaded, it will use all the cores you have.

 

[gamerk316]

More cores helps when two conditions are met:

1: Programs are using multiple threads (they all do)
2: those threads can be executed in parallel

The second is the sticking point: Its very hard to get multiple threads running at the same time for most tasks in a way that actually improves performance. For workloads that do scale though, they tend to scale to hundreds of cores (anything to do with encoding is a good example). As a result, most of the work is typically offloaded to the GPU instead, rather then the CPU.