> That said, actual hardware in the wild has a surprisingly low level of hardware parallelism in practice. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware shows that for the Firefox user base as of end of Jan 2021 54% of users had 2 cores and 34% had 4 cores.
True, but that's probably about to change soon. Look at the ARM stuff about to enter the arena.
I wouldn't bet on us using just 2-4 cores 10 years from now. And we need to plan for that.
Well, right, that's why the Firefox CSS implementation actually aims to be parallelized and has been for years. I'm just saying that the wins from that on current hardware are not as large as one would hope. And that the increase in number of cores has not been increasing nearly as fast as one would like, in devices that most people actually own.
Yeah, it's a chicken and egg problem. Old software doesn't use many cores, and even new, single threaded one doesn't (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc.).
Because software doesn't really need many cores, no need to create CPUs with many, many cores.
I imagine the cycle's going to break at some point, after all we can only ignore having many cores for so long. Especially that now even mobile devices routinely have at least 4 cores.
Mobile devices in the field typically have _more_ cores that desktop devices. The Firefox hardware report is strongly influenced by there being a lot more desktop than mobile Firefox users.
As you note, the modal number of cores on mobile has been 4-6 for a while now.
True, but that's probably about to change soon. Look at the ARM stuff about to enter the arena.
I wouldn't bet on us using just 2-4 cores 10 years from now. And we need to plan for that.