MS knows that Moore's Law doesn't mean faster cores anymore, rather more of them. But, most problems are only so parallelizable, thus the need to get the utter maximum serial performance (and no less important, minimum power consumption) that you can, out of code. This and, speed advances are going to come in good part from GPU parallelism and, I doubt you're going to get that through the CLR. Herb Sutter, head of the C++ team is all over this -- <a href="http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle" rel="nofollow">http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle</a>. C++ and MS' emphasis on parallelism is them facing the future, as they should.