In my career I’d worked with machines with 16 cores before – long before the Mac had more than one processor (never mind cores). And machines with 8 or 16 cores are now consumer appliances whereas previously they were the property of enterprises with money to burn.
Hank Williams writes about how processors are simply not getting any faster…
Apple’s multi-core handling technology is called Grand Central and indeed I am sure it will bring important speed improvements. But from everything I can tell, there is nothing here that is going to bring back the kind of performance doubling speed increases to all applications that we used to see.
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The problem of multi-core computing is really very simple. As most of us have experienced, every problem *can’t* be solved better or faster with more people. Some problems can be solved faster by adding a few people, but most problems cannot. In truth, most problems can best, or only be solved by one person at a time. And so it is with computing.
Hank is absolutely right though one advantage we have is that modern computers run a plethora of separate processes which, while they may not be directly parallel, run concurrently and can therefore be shifted onto other processors. The time may come when monolithic applications have a lot of effort put into their use of parallel processing but for now we’ll end up with a compromise.
We already have GPUs handling a lot of our window events. What about a computer that has 20 or so cores on the desktop. There will always be spare capacity but the processes you have will plateau out in terms of raw speed. But you’ll not be time-slicing with 40 other processes on the same core.
It’s not going to be a perfect world, but not a bad one either.