Hello!
Just gone though an article via Slashdot titled "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" [http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm]. It argues that the continous CPU performance gain we've seen is finally over. And that future gain would primary be in the area of software concurrency taking advantage hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
Perhaps something the Python interpreter team can ponder. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list