Careful now... E=MC2 This means that mass is directly proportional to the Amount of energy, which in turn ;-) means that if you slam your mother and Mr. Click once together at the spead of light you may simply end up with more of the same (or something even worse ;-))

I do agree with that. But is that all we are after... speed? Take a look at the amount of time in a 24 hour cycle that your CPU is idle. We have these masses of Processing power available to us, but do we really make use of it? That's the point behind my original post. Yes, by no means am I saying multi core systems are bad. I'll have a 16 core system on my desk running visual studio and word any day. I just always think that there must be so much more that can be done with a standard desktop PC.... but what? I just can not get to that "What". Gineer

Write more code... but this time only the interesting and fun stuff.

I've always been interested in writing some really awesome parallel computing system using multiple cores on multiple machines on multiple network. Every time I spend time thinking of the solution and finding cool ways to make them work and overcome the intricacies... I always end up with not knowing what the problem for my solution is. What would you use this for? I mean, I know the obvious usage would be crunching large amounts of data for analysis for weather prediction or the like type stuff. These systems generally run on mainframe systems that are inherently multi core. Is that what we are talking about: Are these multi core systems always going to be servers. What would you really effectively do with 16 or more processors on a desktop PC? I can imagine that an application could make use of one or two of them at a time and that you could run multiple apps at the same time all performing perfectly. But is there really anything that we need to do on desktop computers today, that would really make use of a multi core system? Games would probably be able to make the best use of them. In short, I have a solution. but I need a problem to test it with. finding prime numbers is really just getting boring. What could this stuff be used for in real life? Gineer

I hate to break this to you, but you're a programmer like all the rest of us.