In a video apparently taken at Crytek's headquarters, CEO Cervat Yerli talks about running the game on Penryn, a quad-core 45nm chip, saying that "A multithreaded CPU architecture also means multithreaded gameplay, in the sense that we have physics going on, AI going on... for us, more CPU cores means more interaction."
In case you're wondering, the system that's running the game is: Intel Penryn (Yorkfield) Quad core cpu, 3.2GHz; Intel Bad Axe 2 mobo, 2 Gigs of unspecified ram, and a 8800GTX on Windows XP.