It does require software taking advantage, but this was a chicken-egg problem caused by Intel's stagnation. When most CPUs had only 4 cores, developers had an easy excuse: two of the cores were "fake" HT cores so they didn't count, they'd use one core, and the other core was for the OS or other apps, so there's basically no point complicating software for so little gain.
Only recently AMD has opened the floodgates and we got consumer systems with 16 cores, where finally it's really hard to find an excuse to leave 15 cores idle, and there's so much raw power that even suboptimal scaling can give a big performance boost.
Also Rust became a thing, and it makes much easier to write reliable multi-core software, so I'm optimistic about software catching up.
Only recently AMD has opened the floodgates and we got consumer systems with 16 cores, where finally it's really hard to find an excuse to leave 15 cores idle, and there's so much raw power that even suboptimal scaling can give a big performance boost.
Also Rust became a thing, and it makes much easier to write reliable multi-core software, so I'm optimistic about software catching up.