Dual-core systems vs dual single-core systems

The introduction of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and Intel's Pentium D dual core processors will go down in the annals of semiconductor history as a revolution in processor architecture. Suddenly, the classic clock speed performance metric has been seconded by parallelism, which describes how two cores on a single chip boost performance by sharing the workload.

However, the path to parallel computing will be a long one, since the software is just not there yet. Applications are not optimized to take advantage of dual- or multi-core environments (of course, we're not talking about multi-processor platforms)..