I have an eight-core Nehalem Mac Pro. Most of these cores sit idle most of the time due to poorly written software that is not optimized for the post-Moore multicore world.
I am beginning to wonder if Intel’s transistor budget wouldn’t be better allocated to more SRAM cache instead of more cores. One SRAM bit uses up 4 transistors, the Xeon 5500 have 751 million transistors, of which 8Mx8x4 or 256 million are for the 8MB L3 cache. If the chip were brought down from quad-core to dual-core, that would allow doubling the cache. Many programs could run entirely from cache, including interpreters.
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