What application domains are CPU bound and will tend to benefit from multi-core technologies?

Question

I hear a lot of people talking about the revolution that is coming in programming due to multi-core processors and parallelism, but I can't shake the feeling that for most of us, CPU cycles aren't the bottleneck. Pretty much all of my programs have been I/O bound in one way or another (database, filesystem, network, user interaction, etc.) for a very long time.

Now I can think of a few areas where CPU cycles are a limiting factor, like code breaking, graphics, sound, some forms of simulation (weather, physics, etc.), and some forms of mathematical research, but they all seem like fairly specialized application domains. My general impression is that most programs are still I/O bound and that for most of our industry CPUs have been plenty fast for quite a while now.

Am I off my rocker? What other application domains are CPU bound today? Do any of them include a large portion of the programming population? In essence, I'm wondering whether the multi-core CPUs will impact very many of us, and if so, how?

Answer 1

One of the ways to leverage multi core is through a use of remote desktop technologies.

It's much easier to deploy desktop applications to one big Citrix server instead of dozens of user desktops.

Answer 2

Visual effects / rendering. (Entertainment industry.)
Artificial Intelligence. (Games and scientific research.)
Biomedical research.
Physical simulations. (Games and scientific research.)
Database applications including SaaS, most webpages, etc.

As the personal computer becomes more and more a browser-based thin client for web applications, this industry will expand, as well as the need for more, and parallelized processing power on the backend. I could see gaming pushing parallel processing in personal computing.