The September 1 issue of Fortune has an article on multicore processors (I don't think there's a link yet). Basically, it's telling the business folks what we've known for a while: the free lunch provided by Moore's law is over, and no one really knows how to program for these systems.
None of this is news to us. So why am I wasting your time bringing it up again? Well, I want to know who this is really going to affect. If we assume that most software will eventually be delivered over the web, the heavy lifting is going to be done on the server by something like a LAMP stack, and you're going to use JavaScript for the blinky lights. This is going to change how to approach concurrency, and how you take advantage of multicore, if you can.
On the server, a multicore chip is simply going to mean more thread in Apache or more Mongrels. How much to you really win by spawning multiple threads to handle a request though? That's just one more thread waiting for the database query to come back over the network. Likewise on the client. What are multiple threads going to get you other than more resources allocated to waiting on an Ajax call? I guess you could argue that it'll allow the UI to be more responsive, but we already know how to do that.
Before I get flamed, I want to mention that I am in fact aware that there are some areas that really do benefit from the increased horsepower. In particular: games, audio/video, large scale data processing. We already know that each of those can benefit from parallelism. What can your average web application do with those kinds of features though? Or rather, where should I be looking for application domains that take advantage of this new technology rather than simply have technology for technologies sake?
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