One of the things I liked about Haskell was the notion of pure functions and the fact that they can be, in theory, automatically parallelized on multicore hardware. I think this will become a huge deal in a few years as cores multiply. My question is simply this: under GHC is this what really happens with, say a mapping over a pure function. Yes, I compiled with --threaded and am using the +RTS -N2 options on my dual core machine. Here's the code I wrote as a speed test. It just doesn't seem any faster with -N2. Using the ps command I found that multiple threads are indeed launched (this is Linux) but all but one show as being in a state of waiting for some event to finish (the ps output flags them all 'Sl'. main = do rg <- getStdGen let rs = take 10000000 $ randomRs (1::Int,100000::Int) rg rs'= map (\n -> n*n) rs print rs'