This always has been rather obvious, and has been remarked on ever since the first dual core cane on the market. The most remarkable development is that quad core works. The solution is a software architecture that abstract the processor, so that software can be migrated with no effort between symetric architecture (multicore) and asymetric (message passing). This too is limited by the speed of communication channels but with an intelligent optimising distributed scheduler the gains can be even more dramatic than the migration from single core to quad. See www.connectivelogic.co.uk for more information.