Originally Posted by
MU_Engineer
x264 encoding certainly does use a lot of cores, and so can some file compression programs. Other than those, there aren't too many that you'd run on a desktop that are highly multithreaded. There are a ton of workstation applications like CFD, molecular modeling, 3D rendering, and code compilation that are thread-heavy, but they're not desktop applications. The only game I know of that uses a boatload of CPU cores is Microsoft Flight Simulator. There may be more, but most use one to three "heavy" threads and that's about it.