> Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Chrome run mostly single-core and are everyday consumer tools.
Chrome seems very much not to run single core; from what I've read of it's process/threading architecture, it is both aggressively multiprocess and it's processes aggressively multithreaded, with work pushed out as widely as practical, using as many cores as it can, with a strategy around keeping the UI thread and each process’s IO thread as responsive as possible.
I think the aggressively multiprocess bit is about isolation rather than parallelism (background tabs should be mainly idle). On multi threaded rendering, isn't that what servo was trying to do? Not sure if chrome has done much there.
Chrome seems very much not to run single core; from what I've read of it's process/threading architecture, it is both aggressively multiprocess and it's processes aggressively multithreaded, with work pushed out as widely as practical, using as many cores as it can, with a strategy around keeping the UI thread and each process’s IO thread as responsive as possible.