CPU power dissipation

Clock frequencies and multi-core chip designs

Historically, processor manufacturers consistently delivered increases in clock rates and instruction-level parallelism, so that single-threaded code executed faster on newer processors with no modification. More recently, in order to manage CPU power dissipation, processor makers favor multi-core chip designs, thus software needs to be written in a multi-threaded or multi-process manner to take full advantage of such hardware. Many multi-threaded development paradigms introduce overhead, and will not see a linear increase in speed when compared to the number of processors. This is particularly true while accessing shared or dependent resources, due to lock contention. This effect becomes more noticeable as the number of processors increases.