We appear to be at a major turning point in the way we develop software. The major processor architectures, from Intel and AMD to Spare and PowerPC, have run out of room with most of their traditional approaches to boosting CPU performance. Instead of driving clock speeds and straight-line instruction throughput ever higher, they are turning en masse to hyperthreading and multicore architectures. That puts us at a fundamental turning point in software development because for years, we've enjoyed a free lunch as faster computers directly made our applications faster too, and that will largely not be true any more. Most of the coming gains won't be picked up directly by the majority of today's applications. Arguably, the free lunch has already been over for a year or two, only we're just now noticing.
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