&gt; Single threaded programs are no faster on new computers, and most multi threaded programs dont scale well to many cores.<p>There is also some progress - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;singleThread.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;singleThread.html</a><p>I&#x27;m writing this on a Core2Duo E6750 that has a single thread score of 1000 - most new CPUs are at least twice as fast. Also Instructions per cycle going up.<p>It&#x27;s really a hard problem. You can&#x27;t just spawn threads and put mutexes in front of you data structures. This is terribly slow, even slower than single core without locking for some tasks.<p>We need better lockless data structures that minimize synchronisation.