Well its taken advantage of in rendering programs such as final cut, motion, after effects, 3ds max, maya etc. Performance goes up by around 80% with each core added. I remember seeing some benchmarks on toms hardware or somewhere where they replaced the 2 dual core CPUs in the mac pro with 2 4core ones. Performance increase was negligible in most programs, save the ones mentioned above, where it was remarkable. I mean, it basically has the rendering power that a small render farm had 5 or 6 years ago.