Multi-core chips for several years have delivered more performance than most software today can use.
Many multi-core chips outpace the capabilities of software
To truly harness the power of chips that have more than two computing cores, software needs to break its tasks up into pieces that can be acted on in parallel, each by a different core.
It’s a performance gap Gartner sees increasing in the years to come. This from Gartner:
On average, chipmakers get double the number of processors on each new chip approximately every two years. With this doubling of processors and potentially more threads per core, a server with the same number of sockets for chips gets twice as many processors. In this way a 32-socket, high-end server with eight-core chips would deliver 256 processors in 2009. Two years later, with 16 processors per socket, the machine swells to 512 processors. Four years from now, with 32 processors per socket, that machine would host 1,024 processors.
“Most virtualization software today cannot use all 64 processors, much less the 1,024 of the high-end box,” said Carl Claunch, a distinguished analyst at Gartner. “There is a real risk that organizations will not be able to use all the processors.”
Posted by Mark Boslet 
