5.11. Summary

In the future, the majority of machines will have multicore processors. The new parallelization improvements give developers an easy-to-use and powerful way to take advantage of this resource.

Parallelization should enable the creation of applications that would currently run too slowly to be viable. The applications that have the most to gain from parallelization are those in the fields of games, graphics, mathematical/scientific modeling, and artificial intelligence.

Parallelization will require us to make a major shift in the way we design and develop as we move from solving problems in serial to parallel. We currently have difficulty developing bug-free serial applications, and parallelization will undoubtedly increase the complexity of applications, so it is important not to underestimate the additional complexity running code in parallel will add to your applications.