I mean, this conversation has been around for easily 10 years. We live in a world where we already have to do this—look at all the progress in the last decade on the prevalence of futures, async i/o, and channels/queues/whatever. Memory bandwidth and latency has proven to be far more of a performance drag that has improved far slower—the likely areas that will lead to performance problems will be in areas other than single-core clock speed.
As it turns out, Erlang is already providing much better memory locality than your average language. Each process runs in a contiguous memory area (heap+stack) which fits perfectly with a many-core world.
