Comment Re:Time for vector processing again (Score 2, Insightful) 251
Faster computation doesn't help communication-limited tasks. Faster communication doesn't help computation-limited tasks.
Computation is communication. It's communication between the CPU and memory.
The problem with multicore is that, as you add more cores, the increased bus contention causes the cores to stall making so they cannot compute. This is why many real supercomputers have memory local to each CPU. Cache memory can help, but just adding more cache per core yields diminishing returns. SMP will only get you so far in the supercomputer world. You have to go NUMA for performance, which means custom code and algorithms.