I'm the author of a crossplatform DAW. I know what they are capable of. Also, that story of multiple systems is becoming a thing of the past in these days of 32 core ryzen threadrippers.

The vast majority of what the vast majority of users do on computers remains non-CPU-bound. I chose not enumerate all the exceptions, because as usual, they are exceptions.

I'd assume the author of ardour knows what they are talking about! I remember running most things just fine on a dual athlon mp, cubase and ardour. Granted this is quite awhile ago.

This seems contradictory to me.

Most people aren't doing CPU-bound work and there's no point parallelising your application... but people are buying 32-core processors? Why do you think they're doing that?

I'm just a normal developer and I am very frequently CPU-bound in my work, and I see many other people in other fields also CPU-bound. I'd absolutely love to have a massive Xeon in my laptop. I think it'd have a genuine impact on my productivity.

"Just a normal developer" ... you're already in a tiny minority of computer users.

And sure, as someone who regularly spends 4 minutes waiting for my 16 core threadripper to build my application, I appreciate the sentiment.

But ... this is very very far from the majority of computer users do and quite far from what "supercomputers" are used for (frequent, repeated, long lived CPU-bound workloads).