Is having more CPU cores better for programming?

Having more CPU cores can be beneficial for programming, but it depends on the nature of your work:

Multithreaded/Parallel Processing Tasks: If your programming involves tasks that can benefit from parallelism, like compiling large projects, running virtual machines, handling complex data processing, or working with large databases, more CPU cores can significantly improve performance.

Heavy Development Environments: IDEs like Android Studio, Visual Studio, or those used for game development and data science (e.g., TensorFlow) often benefit from multi-core processors, as they can distribute tasks across cores for faster builds, testing, and debugging.

Single-Threaded Tasks: For programming tasks that are primarily single-threaded (such as certain types of scripting or light development), a CPU with high single-core performance may be more beneficial than a higher number of cores.

General Development Workflow: If you're working on a variety of development tasks—testing, compiling, running multiple applications simultaneously—more cores can improve multitasking and reduce lag.

Overall, more CPU cores are advantageous if your programming work is computationally intensive or if you frequently multitask with resource-heavy applications.