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I realize for single applications - the application itself has to be designed to take advantage of multiple cores. But what about executing many different applications simultaneously?
On my development machine at an average instance, I run multiple servers (a database server, a web server), multiple instance of IDEs (either Visual Studio or NetBeans), Web-browser with multiple tabs (in Chrome, each tab is a process on its own), FTP client, SSH client etc. Does having a multi-core system improve the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously?