The Free Lunch Is Over

March 9, 2006 @ 11:22 | In Programming | |

The next challenge for programmers is already here: Concurrent Programming. Forget those days where you could double the performance of your programs buying a faster processor. The Free Lunch is Over, is a great article by Herb Sutter describing why concurrency in the next challenge to beat.

With Dual Cores coming to PC, Xbox360 three cores already out and PS3 (and its cell processors) coming this year, concurrent programming is an unavoidable problem for most programmers.

Until compilers are able to automatically parallelize our code, we have OpenMP, a specification (with implementation available in Visual Studio 2005, and Gcc) that can be used to classify sections of code as parallelizable.

By the way, an interesting article by IBM on compilers and concurrency with the Cell technology is cited in Jare’s Blog.