As long as we agree that saying:
"Having lots of cores is extremely useful, when you have apps that take advantage of them"
...is saying the same exact thing.
And they are both kind of redundant statements. More often, the user won't know which apps take advantage of many cores and which don't. My rule of thumb is, if you don't know that you use a multithreaded workflow, then you probably don't need many cores.
I don't think it's that hard, and there is no need to know any particular apps can utilise how many cores.
OP just has to do his normal work. And right after finish the most demanding parts.
Open terminal and enter
Then the system will display 3 numbers.
They are the CPU threads demanding in the last 1, 5, 15min.
If any of them >8, then OP should upgrade the CPU, because his current config only has 4 cores and 8 threads.
If the numbers is >12, then may be even the W3690 is not enough (due to the W3690 has higher clock speed, the load average can drop to smaller number with exactly the same loading).
Of course, the numbers usually stay within OP's current config (8 thread). However, that's the demand, not usage, for highly multi threads environments. That number can go above the total threads available. e.g. If OP run Handbrake and few more CPU benchmarks at the same time, that number can easily go above 20. Which means the whole system actually demanding more than 20 threads.
Since that's the whole system demand. So, even OP actually never use any multi thread apps, but he often allow 10 single thread apps open at the same time. The system will still shows a number that >8, which means that he can benefit from more CPU cores.
