THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MULTIPLE PROCESSORS: WHY MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS ARE EASY AND INTERNET IS HARD
Peter Van Roy · University of Michigan Library Repository · 2009
The era of programming with single processors has ended. Decades of prophesies have at last come true: programming with multiple processors has now entered the mainstream. Two forces have caused this transition to happen now. First, the Internet, which is a network of many loosely coupled processors. It had been gaining relevance for many years, but only recently has it achieved sufficient bandwidth and reliability to permit real distributed applications. The second force is the emergence of multi-core processors. Each of these forces brings a challenge for developers, but the two challenges are completely different in nature.