[anujsharmax]

> 3. Consequently, most of the processing units now deployed in 4-core-and-up machines are doing nothing most of the time but generating waste heat.

The cores are not being wasted because we don't know how to parallelize computations - as evident by the scientific software run for high performance computing applications, which scales upto million cores.

Business decisions are responsible for these wastages. For example, many engineering software are licensed per core - so if you are using it on 16 cores, it costs A LOT more than using it on 4 cores. In some cases the licensing costs of the engineering software are higher than the cost of the hardware. So no one cares if few cores are wasted.

[rossdavidh]

This would make it a much better idea to run on a machine with only the cores you are using, though, yes?

[marcosdumay]

At some point you want those 16 cores so MS Word will have an acceptable performance, even if your auto-routing electrical CAD uses just 1 of them to solve its own NP-hard problem.