The next leap forward: Parallel Processing

One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can always point to a previous post and say, "I predicted this!".  Unfortunately, predicting parallelism as the next great step for computational processing is no great feat.  The serial nature of our current CPU's is inhibiting.  The processors are fast, but they are primarily single threaded, meaning they can only process one instruction at a time.  The human brain by contrast is slow in comparison to today's CPU's, but the human brain is multi-threaded and can handle multiple requests at once, making the brain more efficient at processing information per cycle.

Last week at the OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems and Languages) conference in Montreal, the programming demi-gods of our age got together to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Simula 67, the first object oriented programming language.