Single Core

To kick off our conversation, Fowler began by recapping the hardware/software relationship prior to multi-core technology. It used to be that compute power was measured by clock rate, where increases in clock speed were common if not predictable. For software vendors, this meant a reliable increase in performance without changing any code. However, as processor manufacturers began to bump up against the barriers of heat generation and power consumption, it looked as though Moore's law would stall along with clock rates. Fortunately, by that time, Sun was well ahead of the game with its SMP-based server products and multi-core CPUs. AMD and Intel took the next step and introduced this technology to the desktop and notebook manufacturers. Fowler made it clear to me that adding cores to a processor is not where it ends. Sun has paid careful attention to scale other components of the processor, such as different levels of cache, as well as other components in their servers to take advantage of the architecture.