> I wonder whether the next bottleneck becomes software scheduling rather than silicon
Yep, the scheduling has been a problem for a while. There was an amazing article few years ago about how the Linux kernel was accidentally hardcoded to 8 cores, you can probably google and find it.
IMO the most interesting problem right now is the cache, you get a cache miss every time a task is moving core. Problem, with thousands of threads switching between hundreds of cores every few milliseconds, we're dangerously approaching the point where all the time is spent trashing and reloading the CPU cache.
I searched for "Linux kernel limited to 8 cores" and found this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260935
> This article is clickbait and in no way has the kernel been hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores.