Bob Blainey

As software developers we have enjoyed a long trend of consistent performance improvement from processor technology. In fact, for the last 20 years processor performance has consistently doubled about every two years or so. What would happen in a world where these performance improvements suddenly slowed dramatically or even stopped? Could we continue to build bigger and heavier, feature-rich software? Would it be time to pack up our compilers and go home? The truth is, single threaded performance improvement is likely to see a significant slowdown over the next one to three years. In some cases, single-thread performance may even drop. The long and sustained climb will slow dramatically. We call the cause behind this trend the CLIP level. C - Clock frequency increases ... (more)