The future of parallel processing & apps

after the gigahertz barrier forced cpu manufacturers to look at parallel processing (multiple cores) as a way to keep up with moore's law i think something has changed. unlike clock upgrades, parallel processing is only utilized by applications optimized for it and older apps no longer see a benefit.

the question is this: is progress (now defined as ever-increasing core counts) practical if applications must hit this ever moving target of increasing core counts. how many apps are dual-core or quad-core even now. how many programmers even know what to do with the extra cores - which brings up another point; does parallel processing allow performance increases similar to higher clock speeds.
i'm noob, so what do you think.

programmers can just wirte a simple program to seek out any extra resources in a CPU or computer and use it

the program doesn't have to be specifically coded for 2 cores or 4

a multi threaded app will work the same way in a quad core as a hexacore it's just the hexacore cpu will win cuz it has more "brains"

Some tasks just aren't efficient to parallelize, so some people won't ever need high core counts. Do realize that individual core speed has been inching higher over time. Specifically look at the turbo speeds on the i7/i5's.

and when they catch up, 8 cores or 10 will be standard. will those programs already be old news, or will they take advantage of the current architecture of the time. will they be stuck in the past

i see you pretty much have your answer here.

something of note though is that as the operating system gets more advanced, it will essentially be able to force any program to run on multiple cores. W7 does this now, but only to a small extent. it can break up any task being processed on one core, and spread it across the others. its not as efficient as a program that is coded to use all available resources, but it will help older programs to scale
with more cores.
by the time W8 gets here, and we have 8 core and up CPUs, even older programs from the single core days will perform vastly better, clock for clock, than they did on their single core counterparts.