We are all excited about multi-core CPUs. If you happen to work in a data center the reductions in power consumption and consequently heat generation are very exciting.
For those of us who develop applications the performance gains have been interesting but not really earth shattering.
But have you stopped to think about how parallelism will affect the way we develop applications?
Here is a link to an abstract (and a download of a full length video) from the University of Waterloo in Canada which touches on parallelism and multi-threading, why it is important in multi-core desktops and perhaps most importantly, how a company is attempting to make creating multi-threaded C++ applications easy to create.
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Riding%20The%20Multi-core%20Revolution.html
Brian Roy 