Although Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip doubles roughly every two years, still applies, today it is said that “the time of a simple increase in the speed of software programs is over”.
ABSTRACT
Processor clock virtually stopped increasing around the year 2005. The reason for this is primarily a large increase in processor’s power consumption at high speeds. Therefore, the producers turned to a different way of increasing processor performance. Instead of increasing the speed, they increased the number of CPUs on a single microprocessor chip, i.e., they began to produce multicore processors.
However, while by increasing processor clock in single-core processors we achieve a linear increase in program speed, with multicore processors the program usually has to be written differently to take advantage of available cores, i.e., we have to switch to concurrent programming.