Days of Free Lunch

The celebrated Moore's law went on despite microprocessors hitting the clock-speed limits in terms of heat dissipation and achieving fabrications beyond nano-level. CPU designers found an intelligent workaround for this roadblock-that of leveraging the increased chip densities to scale the computation infrastructure horizontally as opposed to the traditional vertical way. This principle has deep consequences in modern day architecture and design, where application scalability (both vertical and horizontal) inherits natural elasticity with respect to the infrastructure that powers them. What resulted was a new generation of CPU architectures including hyper-threading, multi-core, and many-core. It wasn't too late before the developers realized that the Free Lunch (just leveraging the conventional CPU performance gains through clock speed, execution optimization, and cache, with no change in their programs) was over. Herb Sutter wrote an influential article in Dr. Dobb's...