Will future app perf gains require concurrency?
The author of this soon-to-be-published DDJ article argues that “applications will increasingly need to be concurrent if they want to fully exploit continuing exponential CPU throughput gains.” The technical gist is that straight-line throughput in standard CPU architectures is stalled at about 3.5GHz for the forseeable future. Therefore hyperthreading, multicoring, and cacheing are the only drivers of future CPU performance gains. The problem comes in because HT and MC only benefit concurrent applications, so to take advantage of them you have to parallelize your apps – and doing concurrency correctly is hard.
