Multicore, dual-core, and the future of Intel

Intel claims that their introduction of hyperthreading into the Pentium line was a way of spurring the development of multithreaded software before the launch of their multicore chips. Maybe hyperthreading really was part of some long-term plan for ramping up to multicore, or, as is more likely, maybe it just happens to look that way in hindsight. But regardless of which of these is the case, software developers are going to have to start aggressively looking for ways to use multithreading to explicitly extract code- and data-level parallelism if they're going to see performance gains on Intel CPUs from here on out.