So Reaper can handle quad cores...

But how is it with 100 core chips? I'm pretty sure that in about 10 years reaper in conjunction with one of these chips (or its descendent) will mix my recordings for me while I go out for a cup of coffee. And when I get back the screen will be blinking... "Shall we play a game?" (edited for correct WOPR reference)

lol...and someone will want 101 cores.

Well, that much processing power and you can take native processing right into the land currently occupied by custom DSP boards and other specialty chips. Kyma Native, anyone? (I know I would love that.) :)

Well that's a server CPU, not for the desktop. I think someone mentioned on this forum that it's easier to do several tough jobs on several cores, then say hundreds of small ones on a 100-core CPU. It was some discussion about the GPU and audio performance..