The examples and illustrations in this article suggest that we are just beginning to grapple with the many opportunities and challenges associated with multicore processors. Our initial steps have been limited by technology to modest changes in the overall balance of systems, but technology trends make it clear that the flexibility provided by future process technologies will present us with an abundance of opportunities to design microprocessor-based systems with radically different power, performance, and cost characteristics. The tension between maintaining high volumes by selling standardized products and increasing performance, performance/watt and performance/price by creating multiple differentiated products will be a major challenge for the computing industry. Even if we try to maintain a modest number of "fast" cores, process technology will enable us to provide more cores than users are currently capable of using effectively. This will challenge industry, academia, and computer users to work together to develop new methods to enable the use of multiple cores for "typical" applications, exploiting the physical locality of on-chip communications to enable more tightly coupled parallelism than has previously been widely adopted.