Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Thread-Level Parallelism
The turning away from the con-ventional organization came in the middle 1960s, when the law of
diminishing returns began to take effect in the effort to increase the operational speed of a com-
puter…. Electronic circuits are ultimately limited in their speed of operation by the speed of light
… and many of the circuits were already operating in the nanosecond range.
W. Jack Bouknight et al
., The Illiac IV System (1972)
We are dedicating all of our future product development to multicore designs. We believe this is a
key inflection point for the industry.
Intel President Paul Otellini
,
describing Intel's future direction at the Intel Developer Forum in 2005
5.1 Introduction
As the quotations that open this chapter show, the view that advances in uni-processor ar-
chitecture were nearing an end has been held by some researchers for many years. Clearly,
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