Mihamina,

> Ok, so for the beginner I am (must I ask on the beginners ML?): is
> multicore support just useless or not?

That *entirely* depends on what you want to do. If, for example, you 
have to do a large calculation that is limited by memory and not by CPU,
or, if you have an application that is trivially parallelized anyway, 
multicore support won't make much of a difference. There are 
(many) other applications, however, where it does matter quite a lot.

Actually, the biggest effect of multicore architectures I see is to shift
the emphasis from raw CPU power to memory bandwidth.

-- 
Thomas