Unless you're processing terrabytes of real time data... Which ** very few ** pro traders are... Trading platforms are NOT very CPU intensive. I do 500 trades/day running VB6 and Excel custom systems... And the ONLY bottleneck would be processing real-time quote data... Which is usually a completely separate system from order management. And.... The future is not multi-threading... But grid computing like: http://www.digipede.net/ People coding complex multi-threaded software in 2007... Should be building powerful grids using cheap boxes instead. The kind of programming talent that can optimize real-time systems costs 100K per man year... Versus a grid of 10 boxes = 30 Ghz virtual machine... That costs roughly 10K.