Quote Originally Posted by Chumbucket843 View Post
true, but not by scaling with clockspeeds and internal parallelism can only scale so far.
Exactly.

Think of work as having to move a bunch of school kids from the school to the museum. The faster you do it, the faster the work gets done.

Traditionally, the method was to make the school bus drive faster and faster.
That worked up until Prescott. Then they realized that they couldn't make the bus go any faster as it would be difficult to control and manage.

So Intel's idea was to use instruction-level parallelism (Itanium... SSE)... Basically making your school bus bigger... which helps but it also has limits.
At some point your bus becomes too long to manage any turns - not all programs/tasks can vectorize very well.


Intel, now out of options... has to resort to using multiple buses Welcome to the world of multi-core computing.

And it's screwing over programmers...


It's not gonna end there... I can see more problems in the future that will require drastic changes in hardware that will once again screw over programmers... I'm 90% sure they will happen. But just in case I'm wrong. I'll save myself the embarrassment by not writing it here.