I was just thinking about how windows xp and old linux DEs (Gnome 2, KDE3) somehow felt snappier and now I'm wondering if the rise of multicore/multiprocessing

I was just thinking about how windows xp and old linux DEs (Gnome 2, KDE3) somehow felt snappier and now I'm wondering if the rise of multicore/multiprocessing is to blame. When the windowing stack is running in the same physical core as the kernel maybe it's harder for these things to become disconnected.