> At this point in time, sequential programs started getting slower, year on year, and parallel programs started getting faster.
The first part of this statement is plain wrong. Single thread performance has improved a lot due to better CPU architecture. Look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html and compare CPUs with the same clock rate, where a 2.5 GHz. An April 2012 Intel Core i7-3770T scores 1971 points while a July 2008 Intel Core2 Duo T9400 scores 1005 points. This is almost double the score in less than four years. Of course, one factor is the larger cache that the quad core has, but this refutes Armstrong's point that the multicore age is bad for single thread performance even more.
For exposure to a more balanced point of view, I would highly recommend Martin Thompson's blog mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com. It is a good a starting point on how far single threaded programs can be pushed and where multi-threading can even be detrimental.
Also, I think that fault tolerance is where Erlang really shines. More than a decade after OTP, projects like Akka and Hysterix are finally venturing in the right direction.
Your point is absolutely correct, but your example could be better IMO. It's not fair to compare a desktop chip with 45W TDP with a laptop chip rated at 35W. Not to mention that the newer i7 actually goes up to 3.7Ghz turbo (vs. 2.5Ghz constant for the C2D) for single threaded loads, so the clock rate is not really comparable in that benchmark (even though base clocks are the same).
A better example would be C2D E8600 @ 3.33Ghz and i5 3470S @ 2.90GHz (3.6Ghz turbo). They are both 65W desktop parts, and the single threaded clock speed is similar. You can see that the C2D gets 1,376 in the single threaded benchmark, while the i5 gets 1,874. The difference is not as drastic (the C2D launched at a significantly higher price point as an enthusiast level chip, while the i5 is a budget chip) but definitely still significant. There are probably even better comparisons but I didn't spend too much time picking out comparable CPUs from different generations.
True, good point. I tried to find something with a similar nominal clock speed and forgot about Turbo. But then, Turbo is a good example why single threaded performance is getting better even in the age of multicores.
Sequential programs are getting slower relative to the parallel programs and both the theoretical capacity of the systems. Also much of the market is shifting to chips optimized for power consumption which are, in fact, slower.
So while obviously the most literal and absolute interpretation of the statement "sequential programs are getting slower" is nonsensical, I think there's a very valid point being made.
Obviously, sequential programs haven't been getting slower on new chips. However, the acceleration rate of single thread performance has been slowing, so even with all our tricks we're getting double in four years when it used to be every 18 months just by doubling the number of transistors on an IC.
AMD recently sacrificed some single-threaded performance in order to achieve an increased core count. Whether or not that was a good move or representative of the industry as a whole is open to debate, but it does occasionally happen.
I think your argument doesn't hold up all that well, you said that the improved architecture of the individual cores improved single-threaded performance (despite, I assume, the decreased clock rates), so I think Dr. Armstrongs point that the shift to multicore made sequential programming less profitable holds at least to an extent - if the CPU manufacturers used the same architecture but used just one core and the higher clocks th single-threaded apps would run still faster, but instead the multi-threaded apps benefit more from the improvements in the CPU.
The part of Armstrong's argument I was (explicitly) referring to was not about relative gains of multi-threading but about presumed absolute losses of single-thread performance. My argument against this is not refuted by relative gains of multi-threading..
Of course you realize even bigger gains on many common workloads using parallelism, but this part of his argument doesn't need the first part, which was wrong.
The current Core iX CPUs offer higher clock rates than the Core 2 CPUs from 2008? Using the highest clock available would have skewed the result against Armstrongs argument.
That depends on which CPUs you are looking at, he says "clock rates started sinking" from about 2004. At any rate
pinning the clock rate doesn't make any sense in the comparison, even if you think it's for his benefit.
The single thread performance story may be different if you take 2004 era Xeon/Opteron chips and follow the single-thread performance as they go to the 8-12 core chips later on.
The first part of this statement is plain wrong. Single thread performance has improved a lot due to better CPU architecture. Look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html and compare CPUs with the same clock rate, where a 2.5 GHz. An April 2012 Intel Core i7-3770T scores 1971 points while a July 2008 Intel Core2 Duo T9400 scores 1005 points. This is almost double the score in less than four years. Of course, one factor is the larger cache that the quad core has, but this refutes Armstrong's point that the multicore age is bad for single thread performance even more.
For exposure to a more balanced point of view, I would highly recommend Martin Thompson's blog mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com. It is a good a starting point on how far single threaded programs can be pushed and where multi-threading can even be detrimental.
Also, I think that fault tolerance is where Erlang really shines. More than a decade after OTP, projects like Akka and Hysterix are finally venturing in the right direction.