For the past four decades explosive gains in computing power have contributed to unprecedented progress in innovation, productivity and human welfare. But that progress is now threatened by the unthinkable: an end to the gains in computing power.

We have reached the limit of what is possible with one or more traditional, serial central processing units, or CPUs. It is past time for the computing industry–and everyone who relies on it for continued improvements in productivity, economic growth and social progress–to take the leap into parallel processing.

Reading this essay is a serial process–you read one word after another. But counting the number of words, for example, is a problem best solved using parallelism. Give each paragraph to a different person, and the work gets done far more quickly. So it is with computing–an industry that grew up with serial processing–and which now faces a serious choice between innovation and stagnation.

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