🚀 go-pugleaf

] Parallel hardware is obviously a way to get revolutionary gains in
] compute power, but Bill Joy's law suggests that single CPUs will give
] tremendous gains without paying any software irritations (they
] certainly have done great in the last five years).
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is not true.  What is true is that low end machines (PC's and 
workstations) have made great strides in the last ten years.  The high
end SINGLE PROCESSORS have not.  For example, a single Cray processor has
gone from about 140 Megaflops (Cray 1) to 1000 Megaflops (Cray C-90) in
the last 12 years (these are peak speeds; as such, there is a lot of
room for argument).  If you define a uniprocessor as having a single
set of functional units, the peak gets even lower, as peak clock speeds
have gone from about 12.5 ns (Cray 1) to 2.9 ns (NEC SX-3).  

Bill Gropp