Before the end of the year, Intel's Nehalem processor will hit the market, packing as many as eight cores. However, Anwar Ghuloum, an engineer at Intel, said that developers should prepare not for hundreds, but for thousands of cores in a single CPU, because those are Intel's designs for the future CPUs to be produced in the near future.

The engineer encouraged computer programmers to program for as many cores as they possibly can, even if currently CPUs are shipping with a relatively small number of processing cores. By seeing software as a more abstract entity, programmers would be writing code that is scalable on various types of processors with an infinite amount of cores.

Ghuloum also said that developers are currently barely making use of the power that the multi-core CPUs have to offer, and that they have a tendency to do only the "minimal amount of work they need to do to tap into this performance."