dual core and c

Assuming I am running a C program that is doing some cpu-intensive
work
such as zip -9, I can understand:

If I have 8 CPUs, then it will make no difference at all to the zip
program,
it will only run on one of the CPUs, although this does allow me to
run 8
separate zips simultaneously, which would be cool on a large site.

But what I don't understand is the concept of a "core", as in "dual
core".
What implications does that have for a C program like zip? Does it
have the ability to look at the instructions ahead of time and
pipeline
them or something? Pipelining is something that has been around for
a long time. Did someone just get the bright idea to call it dual
core
instead or what?

Assume the zip in question is written in C89, no fancy parallelism -
at
least not inherent in the language itself.

Thanks. Paul.
.

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