Have programs learned to use all processor cores?

Question

Iron

Hello. About 5-10 years ago, there was no point in buying multi-core processors, because. most programs did not skillfully use all the cores, which means that the performance gain was not observed when comparing 4-core processors with 2-core ones.
Question: has the situation changed and for how long?

Answer 1

It depends.
Notepad, as it could not parallel to 16 cores, still does not know how.
3dsmax loaded all the cores, and now it loads.
It all depends on you and your tasks :)

Answer 2

yes, everyone seemed to be able to, where it was possible to parallelize, even games almost immediately learned to work on several cores.
well, the most important plus for the desktop is not that some program can parallelize, but that you can run 4 programs and not catch terrible brakes as before.

Answer 3

Programs can use as many cores as they want, as long as the algorithm can be parallelized. But here it all depends on the OS - how it scatters threads / threads across the cores. Maybe in general 4 single-threaded programs will be scattered over different cores, and everything will work faster than on 1 core.
Purely from personal experience: gcc can be run with a different number of threads, and on 8 cores (virtually) compilation is many times faster than on 4 (virtual).