many programming tasks simply don't break down neatly into highly-parallelizable chunks. You're exactly right. The answer to multi-core programming isn't to

many programming tasks simply don't break down neatly into highly-parallelizable chunks. You're exactly right. The answer to multi-core programming isn't to run serial programs in parallel. The answer to multi-core programming is to solve a different class of problems. There are large categories of problems that have been known to be embarassingly parallel for decades. It's those problems where the growth will be in the computer industry: graphics rendering, video and audio processing, data mining, etc... My bet is that OS's are going to have a lot more eye candy in the next decade or so.