Multithreading

Dear PHP creators, I was wondering. (And I'm probably the 1000th person asking this.) With all the multiple-core processors and servers popping up lately, are there any future (or current) plans for multithreading in PHP? It's not unlikely to have a PHP script that, for example, needs to send an email, do some database transactions and perhaps communnicate with a web service simultaneously. In such situations where the script needs to wait for multiple external actions it could really improve performance. I know there are other ways to do it. (It's possible to do "multithreading" with sockets.) Still I think it would be cool if there would be native support. As a fanatic PHP programmer it has always been something that I envy about in other languages. Bart