With the Powermac G4 bi-CPU, Apple had made a precursor to computing for the masses. Nowadays this has become more general. It is difficult to follow Moore's law with just one core, thus the constructors of the processors have started to push in the direction of multiplication of the cores. Intel and AMD propose processors with 4 cores, soon 6 and Intel among its prototypes has something that has 80 processors...
On paper, the cpu power is strongly increased,however in practice this is not always the case since few applications are able to draw the best from these configurations.
Programming for this is enormously complicated. It is necessary to cut the program in smaller and smaller pieces and then share them out among the cores, and then collect together the results.The work of optimization becomes more paramount, and it becomes more and more complicated.
In order to clear the ground, Intel and Microsoft have joined the university of Illinois and Berkeley to work on simplifying the optimization of the software. 22 M$ will be spent over 5 years on this project.
If a solution is not found, the work of Intel could be wasted. Who needs a personal computer that has 4,8 or 16 cores if this does not bring about an improvement of performance?
[translation by crispin]
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