I've recently upgraded my main x86 development machine. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing I decided on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. It has become increasingly clear that the wave of the future is multi-processor / multi-core. Intel and AMD are both talking about 8 core processors before the end of the decade, Sun have just release their Niagara core, Microsoft/IBM are using a 3 core Power PC CPU in the new XBox and Sony/IBM have produced the Cell processor initially going multi-core in the PlayStation 3.
With the advent of consumer level multi-core processors in both home computers and consoles it is becoming clear that we are all going to write more in the way of threaded and concurrent code.
I for one am looking forward to having all that processor power, but as usual the question is how are we, as developers, going to make best use of it?
A part of the solution will be the increasing rise of APIs and frameworks such as that by Doug Lea http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/classes/EDU/oswego/cs/dl/util/concurrent/intro.html for Java. By providing well designed and well tested concurrency code, programming multi-threaded applications will be simplified.
Application Servers will take up part of the burden, but at the usual price of lowered performance and increased cost.
I suspect that certain diagrams will become worth their weight in gold such as UML Activity diagrams.
Lesser known concurreny paradigms such as spin-locks will become more widely understood.
The major expense in using these multi-core systems will be in the synchronization points when different threads / processes exchange data. The skill will be in minimising the impact of the synchronization points.
I'd recommend all developers / designers / architects intending on making any money over the next decade to get their hands on this new generation of SMP machines as soon as possible and start understanding the complexities and opportunities.
