Comment Re:How parallel does a Word Processor need to be? (Score 2) 449
Or a spreadsheet? (Sure, a small fraction of people will have monster multi-tab sheets, but they're idiots.)
Email programs?
Chat?
Web browsers get a big win from multi-processing, but not parallel algorithms.
Linus is right: most of what we do has limited need for massive parallelization, and the work that does benefit from parallelization has been parallelized.
This is kind of silly. Rendering, indexing and searching get pretty easy boosts from parallelization. That applies to all three cases you've listed above. Web browsers especially love tiled parallel rendering (very rarely these days does your web browser output get rendered into one giant buffer), and that can apply to spreadsheets to.
A better question is how much parallelization we need for the average user. While the software algorithms should nicely scale to any reasonable processor/thread count, on the hardware side you do have to ask how many cores we really need, especially in since a lot of users are happy right now. But targeting these sorts of operations as a single thread is also the entirely wrong approach. It's not power efficient for mobile users, and it drastically limits the gains your code will see on new hardware, while competing source bases pass you up.