>It's not the move from 32 to 64 bit that's going to be the biggest issues for developers. Our biggest problem will be learning parallel processing to take advantage of the multi-core CPUs.

I don't think so. Most developers (not the ones that participate here), are barely able to program their way out of a paper bag. I personally do know quite a few developers who started in the DOS age and are struggling in the Windows age. Adding something like manual addressing parralell processing would be just to much for about 90% of all developpers.

As perti outlines, I'd expect the compiler and OS to be the layer which is responsible for spreading the work over multiple processors.