Actually, I am researching about multicore programming with C#.
I bought a new book for beginners by Packt Publishing: "C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide", by Gaston C. Hillar - http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and-2005-threaded-programming/book

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/2008-2005-Threaded-Programming-Beginners/dp/1847197108

The book is for beginners who want to exploit multi-core with C# 2005; 2008 and future 2010.

I read the book in one week and it has great exercises to help developers run in the multi-core jungle. Highly recommended for C# programmers.

I must also recommend Joe Duffy's book "Concurrent Programming on Windows".

Developers must return to books in order to exploit multicore CPUs. Luckily, books like Hillar's and Joe's will help us a lot.

I'd like to see if a quad core Intel machine has the same throughput as a quad socket AMD machine of the same speed.

I am watching in trepidation to this whole multi-core single socket thing that is sweeping over us.
I like the AMD thing with a memory controller on each CPU socket and how that CPU can have it's own bank of memory. So with four sockets that's 8 memory banks, but a single socket quad has only 2 banks and on an Intel machine thats all flying through the north chip.

The Mac V8 seems to still strangle Windows Media Encoder (WME can use 6 cores). Though 6 cores is more about quality than throughput speed

It's sad that this "efficient programming" hasn't already been well established. Parallel processing isn't new. We should already be years into this technology for the desktop. It's interesting that the article mentions only Microsoft and Intel as working together. This should be done on a bigger scale with many partners involved. I guess MS is quiet miffed about OOXML not being ratified they want to corner the desktop parallel programming market. LOL. Good luck with that one. I would like to patent the first MS error message for parallel processing. ERROR N00B - Cores 2,3 and 4 are not found. Please reinstall CPU. LOL