One of the main design decisions for Chrome is making it multi-process, that is, each tab runs as a different process. It has many advantages like less memory leak, sandboxing etc. as they have mentioned in the above link.
One aspect they have not mention is enhanced parallelism and the speedup on a multi-core processor due to that. As all modern processors have more than one cores, any application with multiple threads/ processes should be able to take advantage of that by running truly parallelly (in traditional single-core processors, even if the application is multi-threaded/ multi-process, instructions from different threads/ processes are interleaved, not run parallelly). I hope that the processes in Chrome actually spawn native processes and are not just virtual processes managed by some single-threaded virtual machine (like many Java applications).
I'm eagerly waiting to get my hands on it :)
Update: Chrome does spawn native processes for each tab :)
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