Is multi-processing performance relevant?
There are two points to make here. One is that by the end of 2007, experts project that as many as 70% of new computer systems will have more than one core. This is the obvious point. The less obvious point is that flaws in a parallel implementation magnify exponentially as the number of cores in the system increases. When running on a two-core system, even a pretty weak implementation is not that far from the optimal. As the number of cores increases, a good parallel implementation diverges further from a bad one. More on this below.
