The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software:

"Over the past 30 years, CPU designers have achieved performance gains in three main areas, the first two of which focus on straight-line execution flow:

• clock speed
• execution optimization
• cache"

For the near-term future, meaning for the next few years, the performance gains in new chips will be fueled by three main approaches, only one of which is the same as in the past. The near-term future performance growth drivers are:

• hyperthreading
• multicore
• cache