Jeff Atwood wrote:

In my opinion, quad-core CPUs are still a waste of electricity unless you’re putting them in a server. Four cores on the desktop is great for bragging rights and mathematical superiority (yep, 4 > 2), but those four cores provide almost no benchmarkable improvement in the type of applications most people use. Including software development tools.

Really? You must not be using the right tools. :-) For example, here are three I’m familiar with:

Visual C++ 2008’s /MP flag tells the compiler to compile files in the same project in parallel. I typically get linear speedups on the compile phase. The link phase is still sequential, but on most projects compilation dominates.

Since Visual Studio 2005 we’ve supported parallel project builds in Batch Build mode, where you can build multiple subprojects in parallel (e.g., compile your release and debug builds in parallel), though that feature didn’t let you compile multiple files in the same project in parallel. (As I’ve blogged about before, Visual C++ 2005 actually already shipped with the /MP feature, but it was undocumented.)

Excel 2007 does parallel recalculation. Assuming the spreadsheet is large and doesn’t just contain sequential dependencies between cells, it usually scales linearly up to at least 8 cores (the most I heard that was tested before shipping). I’m told that customers who are working on big financial spreadsheets love it.

… And need I mention games? (This is just a snarky comment… Jeff already correctly noted that “rendering, encoding, or scientific applications” are often scalable today.)

And of course, even if you’re having a terrible day and not a single one of your applications can use more than one core, you can still see real improvement on CPU-intensive multi-application workloads on a multicore machine today, such as by being able to run other foreground applications at full speed while encoding a movie in the background.

Granted, as I’ve said before, we do need to see examples of manycore (e.g., >10 cores) exploiting mainstream applications (e.g., something your dad might use). But it’s overreaching to claim that there are no multicore (e.g., <10 cores) exploiting applications at all, not even development tools. We may not yet have achieved the mainstream manycore killer app, but it isn’t like we have nothing to show at all. We have started out on the road that will take us there.