Impact of Multicore to programming for desktops

A must-read-article about the impact of multicore processors for desktop applications:

The situation today is quickly becoming a replay of what happened 10 years ago. Application vendors requiring more CPU bandwidth can no longer count on increased clock speeds for better performance and functionality. Most large-scale client-side applications are written in C or C++ and historically have been designed to be single-threaded. Making applications MT-hot is still a labor-intensive redelivery process. Although a few vendors, most notably in the multimedia area, have made some MT enhancements to their applications, they have just started to pick off the low-hanging fruit. With multi-core CPUs, widespread desktop performance and functionality improvements are still years away.

At the moment multcore processors seems to be nothing more than a way to keep one core free of operating system tasks to leave this core for the application. The result is only a feeled increase in performance.