In the news this week is AMD's display of dual-core CPUs - chips with two processors on them that are promised available mid next year. Intel are expected to show the same thing next week [1]. AMD showed Opterons with dual cores, and Intel are expected to show Itaniums (which puts Intel behind as Itaniums haven't really succeeded). Given the hesitation evident in discussions of clock speed improvements, this may signal a shift towards a symmetric future [2].
What this means for the FCer is that we need to assume a future of many smaller processors rather than one big hulking fast one. Which means our state machines need to be more naturally spread across multiple instances. Already covered if you use a threading architecture, or a DB or disk-based state machine architecture, but a nuisance if your state machines are all managed out of one single Unix process.
This isn't as ludicrous as it seems - unless one is actually running on multiprocessor machines already, there are good complexity and performance reasons to steer clear of complicated threading methods.
[1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1642846,00.asp
[2] http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=46800190&tid=5978