Vance Morrison: CLR Through the Years

At around the 26th minutes, he says:

"There is this notion of server GC and workstation GC, ...... this distinction came back from the good old days when only servers were multi core, no one had a multi core box as a client"

This is plain wrong, really wrong. Workstations which of course are not servers have had multi processors (which is basically multi cores but on different processors) for years, back the the nineties. You could get boxes (they were terribly expensive) from Digital, Sun, HP, SGI, IBM with Alpha, Sparc, PA-RISC, MIPS and Power processors respectively, configured with 2-ways or 4 ways processing. Basically when those processors became multi-processing capable, they got their way to servers and high end workstations at around the time. And by the way, all those processors were 64 bits. 

You could even get cheap dual G4 processors machines from Apple back to 2001, when no one else was speaking about multi-processing in the personal computer world (the workstation market was considered as high end market distinct from the personal computer market). This was the time when Apple was trying to convince the pc industry (and Intel) that running after the gigahertz was pointless and will have to come to an end. It eventually happened.... 

Taking advantage of multi processing is not a new problem, it is a more important problem now because the number of customers and developers affected by it is larger as the whole industry has embraced multi processing as the main path for higher performance. So we will see more and more cores that we need to use.

Before the problem was limited to people doing rocket science who needed to reduce the computing time of large data sets, and to develop complicated visualization apps, or anything involving high performance. They had (still have) to write concurrent code for 4, 16 cores. From now, we will have to write concurrent code for 64 cores and higher not too far in the future, making the problem even bigger.

But again saying that multi-processing was limited to servers is totally wrong, it had appeared on the client many years ago, again during the time when multiprocessing was not a big player in the windows world. 

Some Microsoft people should really go out sometimes, really...