From one of my other commenters:
Multicore is definitely over-promised. I agree with what you wrote and recommend what Donald Knuth had to say on this topic:(http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)
"I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!"