[danielf]

Originally Posted by Chris

The OS can. It is perfectly well able to allocate different processes to different cores and keep all of them busy if required. The only limitation at the moment is that applications themselves can't split between the cores. But the notion that there's no benefit in having an 8-core Mac at the moment is just another piece of internet guff.

True. But that's the issue. It is very unlikely that someone will be using 8 power-hungry applications at the same time, and therefore the benefits of having 8 cores are minimal (imo), unless you are lucky enough to use software that does support multiple cores. The real potential of multiple cores is in multi-threading. At present however, there are fewer applications that support multi-threading than there are cores in the top of the line Mac pro. I would be in the market for one if the software I use supported multi-threading. That's likely to remain a pipe dream for a couple of years though.