Authors: Stephen Toub and Hazim Shafi for MSDN Magazine
It wasn’t too long ago that many software performance bottlenecks could be fixed simply by a trip to the local computer store. Consumers and companies with the means and motivation to buy new computers every 18 to 24 months would find with every new purchase their compute-intensive applications running twice as fast as before.
Alas, those good old days would appear to be behind us. Gone are the days of exponential increases in CPU speed, largely due to pesky laws of physics that are preventing hardware manufacturers from economically and ecologically scaling clock speeds at rates anywhere near to what we’re accustomed to—and to what modern advances in software demand. Instead, the influx of transistors as outlined by Moore’s law is enabling chip manufacturers to exponentially scale the number of cores available in commodity hardware. Today, it’s rare to find single-core machines on sale in the United States, with dual-core being the norm. Next year, expect the typical consumer machine on sale to be a quad-core, with eight-core as the norm to follow shortly thereafter.
