Are multi-core SoCs being held back by the lack of adequate system design and software development tools? Multi-cores supply the advantages of flexible software-defined architectures, but support for system optimization, integration and verification is lacking. Are we taking advantage of new compute density, application partitioning and parallelism? What is enabled with multi-core vs. multiprocessing? How do we accommodate symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing? We need profiling tools, retained legacy code and a deep understanding of hardware / software interaction.