Some softwares can, I'm sure maya can.

There is a bit of talk about the more cores, as I remember when Intel brought out the 6 cores there was a test somewhere when it actually was slower rendering than a 4 core due the the cache in the memory making a bottleneck.

I'm not as up with hardware as I one was, but I'm getting a vibe that theres goingto be a big discussion in the future over CPU and GPGPU's and how they fit.

Intel et al are going for a more core route as a CPU, but the overall performance of haing a GPU (or GPGPU) doing a lot of the calcuations that a CPU would do is very strong. I've done some simple programming using CUDA and and its very good, well above a CPU.

Granted it's easier to programme with the CPU and thats it's advantage, but GPU's are very very powerful, and the tide is moving with realtime rendering etc.

Thing is at the end of the day the closer you go to higher cores the closer your going to parrallel processing and the problems your going to get.

Overall -

Intel and AMD dont want to let moores law down as thats the defining progress with a processor and they are at the top of the tree. If the GPU comes into full throttle and is taken up with all PC's then the CPU would just be milling arround doing the menial stuff, OS, HDD, RAM etc and a card would be doing the mass processing.

Intel are trying to go both ways and make a CPU that will be scalable into a GPU type architecture.

I may be very wrong as I'm about 1-1/2 year out of date on hardware but thats how I think its going.