The neutering isn't that bad, you can still get an improvement by adding more cores. Here's some of my results on a task doing a lot of string comparisons (plus some other stuff): https://image.ibb.co/ecH9VL/coretest.png

Predicted = Theoretical improvement (2 cores are 2x faster than 1, etc)

10k/00k = number of entries being searched (there's actually a variable number of strings per entry)