Abstract
A visit to the neighborhood PC retail store provides ample proof that we are in the multi-core era. The key differentiator among manufacturers today is the number of cores that they pack onto a single chip. The clock frequency of commodity processors has reached its limit, however, and is likely to stay below 4 GHz for years to come. As a result, adding cores is not synonymous with increasing computational power. To take full advantage of the performance enhancements offered by the new multi-core hardware, a corresponding shift must take place in the software infrastructure — a shift to parallel computing.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
