A gentle way of introducing multi-core programming into the curriculum: tutorial presentation
Moore's Law is an observation predicting that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit would double every 18 to 24 months. Until recently, this has roughly translated to increases in clock speed and processing power in the same time period. Recently, however, improvements in hardware processing power are proceeding on a new model. Instead of deriving processing power from scaling clock speed, which eventually increases power usage and heat emission to unmanageable levels, chip manufacturers have begun to increase overall processing power by adding additional processing cores to the microprocessor package, while clock speeds have remained virtually unchanged. New processors will eventually come in heterogeneous configurations such as combinations of high- and low-power cores, graphical processors, etc. These future configurations are being termed many-core architectures.