Fundamentals of Concurrent Programming for .NET (pdf)

Many developers will have read Herb Sutter’s article “The Free Lunch is Over” which talks about the future speed increases of CPUs. The good news is that they will get significantly faster, but the bad news is that you won’t see all of the possible performance gains unless you write your application to take advantage of them. Over the last few years the increase in clock speeds has slowed down, and chip manufacturers are focussing more and more on concurrent execution of code. Hyperthreading was the first step, which allows a single processor core to execute two threads in parallel, but the future is multi-core chips which will allow many threads to execute truly independently. Intel is already talking about chips with over a hundred cores, so if your code is single-threaded you may only be using one hundredth of the available processing power!