The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, Revised Reprint

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Introduction

The computer industry is undergoing, if not another revolution, certainly a vigorous shaking-up. The major chip manufacturers have, for the time being at least, given up trying to make processors run faster. Moore’s Law has not been repealed: each year, more and more transistors fit into the same space, but their clock speed cannot be increased without overheating. Instead, manufacturers are turning to “multicore” architectures, in which multiple processors (cores) communicate directly through shared hardware caches. Multiprocessor chips make computing more effective by exploiting parallelism: harnessing multiple processors to work on a single task.

The spread of multiprocessor architectures will have a pervasive effect on how ...