The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software (2005)
Summary
The article argues that hardware trends have ended the era of free CPU speedups and that software must embrace concurrency to fully exploit multicore CPUs. It explains how hyperthreading, multicore, and larger on-die caches drive near-term performance gains, while many applications still require redesign to benefit from parallelism. It also covers the costs, learning curve, and testing challenges of writing correct concurrent software.