Cheap lunch
Is the free lunch really over? It surely is a question that troubles many software developers. Constrained by the laws of physics, processor manufacturing has definitely changed its rules of play the last few years. It steadily and increasingly becomes near impossible to extract more juice out of a CPUs single core.
Since I started thinking about the implications of the multi-core evolution, I always kept an open eye for situations where taking advantage of multi-core CPUs would profit my work. It is almost certain that the reason has to do with my work being primarily around server side applications, but I'm still to come against many situations where adopting a multi-core influenced approach would have provided additional benefit which could have been achieved by exclusively following this paradigm.
The problem is undeniably evident if we approach it from the side of computational units restricted by the laws of physics. It seems like we will always have a healthy appetite for increased performance, and given we can't get much more out of one core, we must start thinking and programming in a multi-core context. We could do with OpenOffice being more feature rich and faster, thus our desktop needs to be more potent.
At the same time, the web, and networking in general, is increasingly influencing the way we think about, use and create software. Considering the OpenOffice example, there is already a myriad of applications moving similar functionality over to the web. Networking brings distributed solutions to the table, which, alongside other applications, are widely employed for improving software performance.
Next to physics, the software world is governed by the laws economics. The creation of software must result in some form of social, or financial, or other profit, part of which is achieved by minimizing associated costs. It is almost certain that vendors will claim that a data center of quad-core equipped slices is the next answer to our software woes, but it pays to remember that a cloud of commodity hardware might, in some situations, improve rate of return. The lunch was never free, but today, just like 10 years ago, it's really about how cheap the lunch is.
The need for concurrency remains an undeniable must, but whether its mainstream representation will be that of multi-core friendly programming or distributed over a network architectures remains to be seen.