Software as the bottleneck for multicore performance

As AMD came out with their quad-core "Barcelona" chipset, Silicon Valley watcher has an interesting observation how Moore's law will be dwarfed by software slowing down the performance gains.

As we push forward with multi-cored processors in not only servers but basic PCs and over time on mobile devices, there is going to be a need for a huge software "re-programming". We wont only have to rewrite existing applications to take advantage of multi-core processors, but we are also forced to create new tools, and ramp up education from the earliest programming teaching to concentrate on parallel processing. This will make mobile software development even more complex, as you will still have to try and live with the limitation of battery life, at the same time as you optimize your software to take each cycle out of the multiple cores available.

We can be fairly sure that multi-core processing is the domain where chipsets will push forward, so we really are already at the edge of the cliff of this re-programming.