Multithreading, concurrency, parallelism, Core 2 Duo, call it what you will, the revolution is happening. Today.

Chips aren’t getting any faster. Intel have quietly dropped references to clock speeds and chip generations in favour of marketing slogans indicating the number of cores per CPU.

Moore’s law has had a head-on collision with the laws of physics, with predictable outcome.

The future is about making things smaller and having more of them. We’re moving from a world where clock speed doubled every 18 months to one where cores will double every 18 months. Dual core CPUs are commonplace. Quad core is just around the corner. In 5 years time 16 or 32 core chips will be in your desktop.

So here’s the opportunity for software platform vendors: be the best at managing parallelism and making it easy for application developers to leverage all those cores to win tomorrow’s market. Threads (ie. Java and C# threads) are old technology, and a dreadful way of expressing concurrency. Language constructs such as Communicating Sequential Processes that allow developers to explicitly describe concurrency are far easier to understand and reason about. See also: the book and wikipedia’s entries on CSP and process calculus.

Myself I’m hoping the smalltalk vendors pay attention and adapt. They have the advantage that smalltalk is mostly written in itself. Paradigm shifts don’t come around that often. Fortune favours the prepared mind.