Software Pipelines and SOA: Releasing the Power of Multi-Core Processing

Foreword

Multi-core hardware is the new normal. Major computer chip vendors have essentially halted the regular increase in CPU clock speeds that reigned for almost a half century in response to issues like power consumption, heat output, and unpredictability of quantum physics (to paraphrase Einstein, CPUs shouldn’t play dice...).

Instead, they are using multi-core architectures to deliver increased processing power in place of faster clock speeds. Although this is a logical move, a large percentage of existing software applications cannot take advantage of the processing power on the additional cores, and they often run even slower due to reduced clock speeds in multi-core CPUs, setting up what could be called the Multi-core Dilemma. ...