By Dan Woods
“The widespread adoption of multicore hardware is in many cases actually slowing down computing. A typical scenario: A company has a data-intensive software application and wants to make this software run as fast as possible. When its single-core machine reaches end of life, the company purchases multicore hardware. To everyone’s surprise, the application starts to run slower.
For technical support staff, the first question to ask when someone calls with a performance problem is, Have you done a hardware upgrade? Often, when the application is switched back to single-core hardware, the problem disappears. ”
