There's a lot going on here. First thing is Moore's Law. If it continues to hold, we'll be able to have more processors working on the same task, but more impo

There's a lot going on here. First thing is Moore's Law. If it continues to hold, we'll be able to have more processors working on the same task, but more importantly, we'll have more processors working on different tasks, concurrently. This is huge. Think "computronium." A revolution? Yes. Secondly, the problem of optimizing our algorithms for maximizing multithreaded performance is not solved. There's still much research being done in this area (e.g. Terascale, good CS departments). We can assume that our ability to use parallel threads will increase, although it will level off eventually, of course. The question is, how good are we at using many processors? I would wager that we aren't very efficient at that yet. You are correct in pointing out the applicability of Amdahl's law, but exponential decay in the processor/performance ratio does not immediately mean we still can't reap major benefits from more cores. In this vein, I encourage you to think about the "long tail," and what that could mean for (parallel) computing power.