Sequential Programming: Like Eating Peas with a Straw.

Before the era of multicore chips, performance gains in CPUs was achieved by a combination of ever increasing speed and architectural enhancements. This resulted in more and more power being consumed by the processor -- a situation that could not continue forever.

Something's cooking

I remember a tongue-in-cheek competition 'alternative uses of the Pentium' that came up with some entertaining suggestions. The winner suggested wiring four Pentiums together and using them as a cooker hob. Very amusing! 

The multicore race is here

Rather than making processor faster and faster, the received practice now is to get extra performance by multiple cores. Recently I read a news item that said a start-up company was proposing to make the first 100 core CPU -- claiming that they would 'pip Intel to the post.' So rather than the MHz race we had in the '80s and '90s, we are now entering the multicore race. It seems to be that the multicore era is here to stay -- so we'd better get used to the idea.   

Back in 2007, Intel announced to the public it's 80 core research chip. It made some  programmers wonder how on earth a program be written to take advantage of so many cores.  Writing for 2 or 4 cores seemed manageable, but 80 cores seemed unimaginable. 

Figure 1: Intel's 80 core research chip (circa 2007) .