Does VisualC++ take advantage of my SMP machine to compile faster?

In short: no. The Microsoft C/C++ compiler is not optimized for multiprocessor machines, nor does DevStudio or NMAKE take advantage of them by performing parallel builds. Also, the compiler itself is not [currently] multithreaded, as the compiling process is basically a sequential process. However, you might see some overall performance improvements on an SMP machine.

On the other hand, the compiler is pretty optimized for single-processor machines, which are the most common ones. For example, the compiler can accept multiple filenames on the command line and process them one-by one sequentially. This reduces system overhead, because there is only one compiler instance created for all files, instead of creating a process for each file.