The challenge for the programmer is how to write programs to take advantage of so many cores. Thankfully companies such as Intel (did I say I work for them ) are putting huge efforts and resources into enabling programming in parallelism
an example of a tool suite that can be used to write parallel applications. Its good that the semiconductor industry is taking a lead in developing software tools as well as silicon, otherwise programming for these newer devices would be something akin to eating peas with a straw - entirely possible , but not very efficient.