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?
