"A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software"

[Lee Harr]

>> [http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm]. It argues that the 
>> continous CPU performance gain we've seen is finally over. And that future 
>> gain would primary be in the area of software concurrency taking advantage 
>> hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
>>

> Well, yes. However, it's not as bad as it looks. I've spent a good part
> of my professional life with multiprocessors (IBM mainframes) and
> I have yet to write a multi-thread program for performance reasons.
> All of those systems ran multiple programs, not single programs
> that had to take advantage of the multiprocessor environment.
> Your typical desktop is no different. My current system has 42
> processes running, and I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority
> of them aren't multi-threaded.
>


Exactly. If every one of your processes had its own 2 Ghz processor
running nothing else, I think you would be pretty happy. Your OS
had better be well-written to deal with concurrent access to
memory and disks, but I think for general application development
there will be huge speed boosts with little need for new
programming paradigms.