520
PC speed gains erased by modern software
(hackaday.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So what I want to know is why do we still have programs that run on a single core when nearly every Windows PC out there is running a multi-core processor?
What are we missing to have the OS adapt any program to take advantage of the hardware?
To run something on multiple cores you need to detect a bunch of different tasks it is doing that don't depend on one another. Then you can execute each task in its own thread. The problem is that most often these different task don't exist, or, if they do, figuring them out automatically by the code is likely equivalent to solving the halting problem, that is it's undecidable and there can't exist a program that does this.