Until a few years ago, the processor hardware community translated Moore’s Law of transistor density directly into single-threaded performance gains as a result of increasing clock frequencies. Lately, this translation has been hampered by the effects of clock frequency on power consumption and heat generation. The new reality is that per-thread performance is essentially static, and an increase in performance is delivered by an increase in the number of available processor cores per socket. This greatly simplifies a processor developer’s job. However, nothing in life comes for free.
Multicore Processors
January 13, 2009