Yay! Love the smell of that new piece of hardware you just bought? That feeling when peeling off the tight plastic. Plugging it in. Seeing lights, fans what ever else do something. Why not let loose on the voltage controls and see what the new device can really do. CPU over clocking has become a breeze these days and so has cooling, which you will need a lot of when overclocking. Many people are concerned about performance degradation over time when the CPU is juiced up on extra voltage. Fair point, but looking at the trend of CPU performance over say the last 15 years it’s crystal clear that a 7-8 year CPU cannot keep up with heavy computing such as games, rendering and anything else that needs CPU cycles. So what will, say, an i7- 5820K have to say for it self by the time the year 2022 ticks over?
The general trend in processor evolution is that we have given up on trying to go mega quick and instead are concentrating on go wide by way of cores and efficient by way of the manufacturing processes used. This trend has and will continue for the foreseeable future because it is driven by demand of ever more powerful and efficient mobile devices.
Software is getting better at utilizing cores more effectively (and Microsoft has jumped on board by announcing pricing plans per core rather then per socket). Not all software needs multi-core performance, instead it relies on single core performance to get its work done. Most games work like this as do lots of desktop programs. In the server world software such as databases, web or application servers are much more optimized to utilize multi-core processors. Visualization is where I think multi-core processor really come into their own by even supporting multiple virtual machines.
Pocket processor
Soon the time will come where we will carry our processors in our pockets.