And with programs for which Amdahl's Law isn't a huge concern, multiprocessing isn't necessarily even the most appropriate form of parallelism. Multiple cores is great for situations where the sequential fraction of a program is relatively high, because it helps minimize the cost of synchronization.

But it can also bring some problems that might limit performance, such as bottlenecks on shared resources such as memory and I/O. If the problem can divided into fairly large and independent chunks of work, on the other hand, then distributed computing becomes a lot more attractive.