Advances in computer architecture to provide higher parallelism (e.g. hyper threading and multi-core) usually incur in higher complexity in software development. Applications should be designed to use efficiently the additional resources in order to improve its performance. However, the popularity of mobile devices and recent studies in IT-related energy consumption have driven software developers to focus also on energy efficiency. Besides improving applications’ performance, software developers should aim at minimizing the amount of energy consumed by the applications. Energy saving becomes an important non-functional requirement for new applications. This paper evaluates the behavior of applications on multi-core architectures and proposes energy-saving alternatives for software development.