Digital Home Thoughts: Tom's Hardware Revisits the Value of Multiple Cores

"A few months ago, we looked into the effectiveness of using different numbers of CPU cores with various types of software. We received a lot of good feedback from that article, and there were some interesting suggestions from the community that we've taken to heart in this follow-up."

A while back, Tom's Hardware did some tests to find out that most anyone stood to benefit from multi-core CPUs though those benefits diminished as the number of cores went past 3. In revisiting this issue, they've improved their testing methodology and found that not much has changed. The change from single to dual cores is quite dramatic and desirable, though for regular day to day use, triplets and more are not really that necessary. Of course, ethusiasts are we all are, it makes sense, but if you look at the netbook market, the majority of them are still single core workhorses, and many people are finding them adequate to the task. That realization has me believe that single core CPUs will still be around for quite some time to come, though they will be found with a lot of supplmentary horsepower to handle specialized tasks, like NVidia's ION, which handles video processing. I've only halfway migrated to multi-cores for all my home PCs and to be honest, I'm not seeing a huge benefit for my regular work. Anyone, who isn't doing video transcoding, gene manipulation or DDOSing Twitter, believe that multi-cores is absolutely necessary to daily computing? Why?