By Matthew Murray
Ever since the first dual- and quad-core CPUs were released several years ago, the procedure for buying processors has involved counting the number of cores in the CPU, counting the number of dollars in your wallet, and then doing your best to match up the values. After all, chips that haven’t been overclocked haven’t gotten much faster than 3.3 GHz or 3.4 GHz, so despite a bit of variance here and there, you’ve generally been able to feel secure that the more cores your CPU contained, the faster it would perform overall.

This has been acceptable thinking up until now—after all, it’s only this year, with the release of Intel’s Core i7-980X and Core i7-970 and AMD’s Phenom II X6 series (including the 1090T, the 1055T, and the 1075T), that the number of cores on consumer CPUs has outgrown what you can count using just the fingers on one hand. But technology never stops advancing, and some recent research is showing that current advice to buy the most cores you can afford may not remain practical for much longer.

A group of MIT researchers are presenting a paper today at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation in Toronto, titled “An Analysis of Linux Scalability to Many Cores,” that details research about how very large numbers of cores affect processing performance. The paper may deal with Linux specifically, but it’s a helpful reminder to everyone about the challenges facing hardware and software design in today’s computing world—and how important it is that these problems get solved soon.

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