Scalability of parallel programs

Faced with the challenge of reducing the power consumption of conventional microprocessors while delivering increased performance, microprocessor vendors have leveraged increasing transistor counts to deliver multicore processors. Packaging multiple, possibly simpler cores, operating at lower voltage results in lower power consumption, a primary motivation for multicore processors. A by product of this is that parallelism becomes the primary driver for performance. Indeed, multicore designs with up to 16 cores are currently available, and some with up to 80 cores have been prototyped.