It's hard to catch your breath when following Intel. Barely a day goes by without a new technology or product coming to market.

There is a huge amount of coverage this week for Intel's new flagship processor for the desktop market - the  Core i7 980x Extreme.

The incredible thing about this particular piece of silicon is that it has 6 cores and hyperthreading technology to virtualise twelve cores. Twelve cores! It seems like yesterday that we were talking about dual core processors! The chip takes advantage of Intel's 32-nanometre process - packing in 1.17 billion transistors, with a clock speed of 3.3 Ghz.

The challenge now is for software developers to catch up with the pace of hardware change. It's no exaggeration to say that Intel's hardware is forcing a complete re-write of how developers approach programming.

Right now, there is some inevitable lag between hardware advancement and software able to take advantage of these changes - you can't simply boot up Windows 7 and Firefox on a machine running a Core i7 980x Extreme and expect it to run faster.

But if you work in the fields of video and photo editing then this new processor will make your life easier as tools like Adobe Photoshop can take advantage of the increase in threads. And what you will see is a 50% improvement in performance, according to benchmarks.

So what can be done to reduce that lag, especially when software typically lags hardware development by three to five years?

Well, Intel has a software developer program with tens of thousands developers already signed up.

To my mind, if you are serious about software development you need to work with Intel. As the industry leader in chip development, partnering with Intel informally or formally is the best route to maximising your software's potential.

And if you want to get started with Intel's multi-core processors, how about these free one-day courses on parallelism and threading from Intel?

You can read more coverage on the launch of Intel's six core processor here.