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I am currently running the KDE on OpenSuSE in a VirtualBox hosted by Windows 11 running on a processor with 14 cores. I gave Linux 4 CPUs to play with. So, I am aware of the need for some amount of multi-processing and multi-threading. But when looking over the new technology on the market, I see chips with 96 cores supporting up to 192 threads. What kind of application would benefit from such a configuration? I'm expecting that 90% of such a monster would never flip a bit on a system I use.

Is there any research literature available which discusses the practical needs of users regarding multi-core, multi-threaded processors?

Steven Thomas Hatton
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Any CPU-intensive application that supports parallelization may be able to fully utilize such a processor. Such applications may range from simulations run by academics (especially where you may not offload your computation tasks to GPUs) to tech giants running servers that serve millions of users.

You yourself have given a hint of one such use case. Such a powerful CPU can be shared among multiple virtual hosts. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a popular cloud computing service model that often uses container-based virtual hosts.

codeR
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CPUs with lots of cores are commonly used on servers that handle lots of separate requests, such as web servers. If I am loading one page and you are loading a different page (or even the same page), these are completely separate. A computer that has 96 cores can handle 96 times as many page loads at once as a computer that has 1 core.

It might even be better to have more cores if they are slower, because they typically use less energy. This partially explains the popularity of ARM servers - ARM has grown up from very-low-energy very-low-speed designs, and still typically achieves somewhat better performance/energy ratios than x64 chips.

Conversely, what isn't a good fit for a many-core CPU? Anything that does not process a lot of things at the same time. Typically, game servers fall under this category: even if most games could be written to split up work and take advantage of many cores, they aren't, so most of the game runs on one thread and you want a CPU that runs that one thread as fast as possible. You'd rather have a 5GHz 8-core chip than a 2.5GHz 96-core chip because 95 of those cores wouldn't be doing very much anyway, and the other 1 core that was doing something would be half as fast.

Stack Exchange Broke The Law
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