Thanks in large measure to the improvement in semiconductors predicted by Moore’s Law, CPU performance has increased 40-50% per year over the past three decades. The advent of Multicore processors marks an end to sequential performance improvement and a radical shift to parallel programming. To understand the consequences of this change, it is worth looking back at where the thousands-fold increase in computer performance went and looking forward to how software might accommodate this abrupt shift in the underlying computing platform.

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