According the “we get it now” genius at the New York Times, coding multi-threaded software is hard.  Go figure!  Other than making it easy to make fun of mainstream media again, this article does bring up some good points.  Multi-threaded coding is completely different than the coding models used since the beginning of time and software engineers are having to completely re-learn their art in order to keep up with hardware advancements.  And so, because of lazy programmers, your CPU is lame.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”