let's see some numbers

For what it's worth, I regularly run testsuites and build jobs that are embarrassingly
parallel, so when I purchased a quad-core for work this fall, make -j made a nearly linear
improvement on this particular bottleneck in my work cycle. Didn't make me any smarter or
quicker with emacs, but made a half hour cycle between major edits collapse to about 7
minutes. That was very noticed. I'll happily support buying 256 cores on the same line of
reasoning, when they're available, because 7 seconds is much better than 7 minutes!

(And this is a tolerably fast job; I've had embarrassingly parallel workloads that take
*weeks* on the provided hardware. That's when you start snooping around for cross-organization
job queues and whatnot, to steal idle time from other machines.)

I'll grant that developers are probably not who the multicore "revolution" is aimed at. But
the numbers I've seen suggest that transaction-bound network servers of various forms see a
good win too: particularly those that were built around some sort of process-pool or
thread-pool model. More of the parallel thingies run at the same time. QED.