Yeah, if you do things that are strictly CPU-intensive like videos and compression and things, more cores will help. It's just that for gaming it's fallen short of the promise.

As for future proofing, I'm sure everyone who bought a Core 2 Quad CPU is still waiting for that moment.

I think in the future the answer is going to be specialized cores. General is nice in theory, but in practice it's wasted.
Right now, we already have the GPU offloading all that work from the CPU that theoretically it could do (but would run at under 1 FPS for most games). We used to have separate sound cards, in fact I still do as I never gave up my X Fi, but when CPUs got fast it stopped for mainstream use.

If the CPU became the true CENTRAL PU, with only a couple of cores, but farmed out video to a specialized core/PU that worked with the video, and another core worked only with sound, and another core worked only with AI, and another core worked on storage IO, and so on while the CPU oversaw it all and combined the results of the specialized units...I think we could see an increase. However, in the short term I think this would drive up costs both for hardware (mobos would be more complex as well as processors) and software (programming would require a totally new compiler and way of thinking), so I'm not hopeful.



The Jedi Master