That advice has been floating around for a while and is really only applicable when you have identified bottlenecks in the tempdb.
some good advice about this here
http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/A-SQL-Server-DBA-myth-a-day-(1230)-tempdb-should-always-have-one-data-file-per-processor-core.aspx"> http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/A-SQL-Server-DBA-myth-a-day-(1230)-tempdb-should-always-have-one-data-file-per-processor-core.aspx