"A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software"

[Erik Max Francis]

aurora wrote:

> Just gone though an article via Slashdot titled "The Free Lunch Is Over: A  
> Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software"  
> [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, I think it's reasonable to expect that _eventually_ (whether soon 
or relatively soon or not for a long time) Moore's law will fail, and 
the exponential increase in computing power over time will cease to 
continue.  At that point, it seems reasonable to assume you'll do your 
best to take advantage of this with parallelization -- if your CPU won't 
get faster, just put more and more in the box.  So I've always had it in 
the back of my mind that languages that can easily support massive 
(especially automatic) parallelization will have their day in the sun, 
at least someday.

-- 
Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
   All the people in my neighborhood turn around and get mad and sing
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