The problem with thousand of cores is not hardware related. Yes, Intel can build thousands of core by continued innovation in the hardware. However, the software community is still struggling to understand how to use even 8 cores. The concurrency issues are enormous. For example look at the following post: http://kashi.webhop.net/blog/Technology/index.php/archives/22 Till we solve the concurrency issues the increased number of core will not achieve any higher performance. The C++ is just starting to deal with concurrency. C++0x adds threads support however, that is just the starting point.