Re: the problem they have to avoid

Even if a machine is only moderately busy, you can often see half a dozen threads in the ready-to-run state. It is fairly easy for the OS to spin off device driver work into other threads and all of an application's screen drawing can be spun off.

IMHO, most client machines don't do enough work for it to matter either way and most server workloads are easy to spread across cores. Niagara wouldn't exist otherwise.

There are plenty of *magazine benchmarks* that will punish a multi-core processor and Intel have to watch out for that, but if Intel did produce a chip with too many cores, they'd simply market it as a "server product" and sell it to people who knew where they could stick it.