Chapter 23. Concurrency

For several decades, microprocessor development has followed Moore’s Law. This is an observation by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that you can fit on a chip, for a fixed cost, doubles roughly every 18 months.

There are a number of results of this. One is that the cost of chips goes down over time. Something like the iPhone has a faster CPU than the first desktop machines OS X ran on, but costs a fraction of the price. The second is that processors tend to get faster.