I'm sure this has already been pointed out, but unless you're working with a well documented highly scalable and very specific problem like say, Navier-Stokes simulations you're not going to utilise many of those 80 cores. Running a single threaded program will still only use one core in all likelihood. (But hey, Vista needs more cores to run all those DRM checks 30 times a second!)
And most parallel programs don't scale well past 8 processors anyway, so until some new programming paradigm and better compilers are available, this is just another "Everest" a.k.a "Because it was there and we could".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this has already been pointed out, but unless you're working with a well documented highly scalable and very specific problem like say, Navier-Stokes simulations you're not going to utilise many of those 80 cores. Running a single threaded program will still only use one core in all likelihood. (But hey, Vista needs more cores to run all those DRM checks 30 times a second!) And most parallel programs don't scale well past 8 processors anyway, so until some new programming paradigm and better compilers are available, this is just another "Everest" a.k.a "Because it was there and we could".