In response to Atwood's original post, Sutter named three tools that offer speedups on quad-core platforms:

Visual C++ 2008’s /MP flag: "I typically get linear speedups on the compile phase. The link phase is still sequential, but on most projects compilation dominates."

Visual Studio's parallel project builds in Batch Build mode, "though that feature didn’t let you compile multiple files in the same project in parallel."

Excel 2007's parallel recalculation: "Assuming the spreadsheet is large and doesn’t just contain sequential dependencies between cells, it usually scales linearly up to at least 8 cores."

In a valuable read that explores much of the current sentiment about manycore mania, Atwood writes:

I implored commenters who felt strongly about the benefits of quad-core to point me to multitasking benchmarks that showed a profound difference in performance between 2 and more-than-2 CPU cores. It's curious. The web is awash in zillions of hardware review websites, yet you can barely find any multitasking benchmarks on any of them. I think it's because the amount of multitasking required to seriously load more than two CPU cores borders on the absurd...