Theo de Raadt wrote about the Intel Core 2 Duo chip: "Various developers are busy implementing workarounds for serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 cpu. These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code." Intel has given a response to the concerns as well.
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Member since:2007-01-18
That's probably the idea, but I've read a few articles about bad thread programming even from seasoned pros. Most developers have never had to deal with multiple threads and thus have trouble writing efficient multi-threaded programs.
However, in your case having a single processor or core would have help you find the error faster. 
Member since:2007-02-21
Multithreaded programming can be a beast to tackle. I just got a great book that deals with it in the Java world.
I can only really speak from a Java perspective since that's what I do day in and day out. Java is concurrent whether you like it or not. That is because even if I write a single threaded console app, the jvm is still multithreaded. An example is garbage collection runs in its own thread. Another one is your servlet can be called concurrently. So my perspective is rather different, everybody is exposed to threads and people need to start taking that into account in their code.
On the flip side, a couple weeks ago this website reported a statement made by some Intel hot shot that said something to the effect of you all should start programming parallel and concurrent applications for every task. That of course is just stupid. There has to be some benefit for the added complexity.
Member since:
2007-02-21
My understanding is that threads are supposed to be spread across multiple cores (assuming the OS handles it). In that case, wouldn't any application that is multi-threaded take advantage of multiple cores?
An example is I was writing a swing app and made a stupid mistake where I had an infinite loop in my ui code. But since it was operating in a single thread it pegged only a single core and I was none the wiser until I happened to look at my processor usage. I had never set out to write my app for dual core.