Why we should still care about singlecore performance

First off, don't expect to read some brand new genious insight here, I'm not telling anything new.

I just wanted to draw some attention to a great lecture by Mark D. Hill on "Amdahl's law in the Multicore Era", which is available on the Google Tech Talks YouTube channel.

Last weekend, I finally found some time to watch it. Although most of this stuff isn't new to me, I liked the way in which Hill explained everything.

Although processor manufacturers (Intel, AMD, ...) are well aware of the importance of singlecore performance (see the recent Intel Nehalem architecture for example), it never hurts to be reminded of the fact that performance boosts won't come for free by throwing more cores at it. And this holds even if we can parallelize the major part of our favorite application and/or have tens to hundreds of cores available.

If you're interested in performance and the recent multicore trend, you should make sure to take the time to watch the lecture.

Suggestions for other interesting lectures like this one, on related or less related subjects, are welcome...