The future in your pocket

There is a growing sentiment among academics in computing that a shift to multicore processors in commodity computers will demand that all programmers become parallel programmers. This is because future general-purpose processors are not likely to improve the performance of a single thread of execution; instead, the presence of multiple processor cores on a CPU will improve the performance of groups of threads. In this article, I argue that there is another trend underway, namely integration, which will have a greater near-term impact on developers of system software and applications. This integration, and its likely impact on general-purpose computers, is clearly illustrated in the architecture of modern mobile phones.