this story about valve moving the source game engine to multicore is an encouraging development. all demanding apps, especially games, from here on out simply must be written with multithreading/multiprocessing in mind.

the presentation that valve made said that multicore processing is the "most significant development since 3D cards". why get excited now when we've had multiprocessor motherboards since the pentium classic? i suppose because now its mainstream. every intel and every amd chip in your average new PC will have at least two cores. in a few years, the installed based of hardware will all be multicore. computers have always simulated multitasking but when they're actually doing two things at once, programming gets a lot more complicated.