It's a matter of these multi-core "general purpose" CPUs are only really useful for a fairly limited set of specific problems.
Not necessarily. Long-running code can be compiled to run in many threads (CPUs) at the same time. For example there is this MIT Cilk project that was fairly recently spun out as a funded startup
Naturally, if you have a highly multi-threaded program then having many cores is useful. But even for single threaded programs, a multi-core toolkit can compile/interpret a compute intensive function to run across many cores.
Cilk is focusing on C++. I think interpreted languages have a real edge here because the parallelization can be built into the interpreter; the JVM for example.
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Not necessarily. Long-running code can be compiled to run in many threads (CPUs) at the same time. For example there is this MIT Cilk project that was fairly recently spun out as a funded startup
http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/
Naturally, if you have a highly multi-threaded program then having many cores is useful. But even for single threaded programs, a multi-core toolkit can compile/interpret a compute intensive function to run across many cores.
Cilk is focusing on C++. I think interpreted languages have a real edge here because the parallelization can be built into the interpreter; the JVM for example.