Limitations in processor design mean the ‘free lunch’ is over for software developers, as we come to terms with the fact that chips simply aren’t going to get much faster. Matt Nicholson went to Think Parallel, Intel’s conference held in Lisbon in April 2007, to find out more.

Originally published on DNJ Online, Jun 2007

Up until now, programmers have had it easy. Ever since the first 16-bit processors appeared in the late 1970s, processor speeds have been increasing at an exponential rate, doubling every two years, or more recently, every 18 months. The modern Intel Pentium 4 offers 10,000 times the processing speed of the 8086, found in the original IBM PC. However the essential architecture has remained unchanged, which means programs which ran on last year’s processors continue to run on today’s, only faster. They may need to be recompiled to take advantage of the latest technology, but in the end it has always been hard disk or network access that caused the bottleneck and that wasn’t a coder’s problem.

However, as we found out at Think Parallel, Intel’s EMEA Channel Conference 2.0 held in Lisbon in April 2007, that’s about to change. Here Herb Sutter, Microsoft Software Architect and chair of the C++ Standards Committee, told us in the opening keynote, “Your free lunch is over.” Up until recently, clock speed has increased along with processing speed, from the 4.77MHz of the 8086 to the 3.2GHz of the Pentium 4. However Intel abandoned plans for a 4GHz processor in 2004, and since then maximum processor speeds have increased to only around 3.8GHz. Read More