Posted 09/10/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

Francois Piednoel is worried.

For those of you who have never met Francois, he’s a member of the performance marketing team at Intel. It’s always entertaining to carry on a conversation with Francois. He was the guy at Intel who first steered me to the idea of building small systems around an X58 micro ATX motherboard and undervolting the CPU while maintaining the reference clock speed. This is sort of the inverse of overclocking, and results in pretty high performance systems that run cooler and quieter than the norm. What worries Piednoel, though, is this: what are desktop users ever going to do with six cores?

Moore’s Law means we get more CPUs with more and more transistors. Or we get smaller CPUs with the same number of transistors as past products. But what are the practical benefits for users?

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