SOFTWARE DEMAND, HARDWARE SUPPLY.

The article focuses on how computer software and hardware evolve together. The authors examined all the SPEC CPU program suites that were developed after the initiation of the benchmarks. They collected data on the number of transistors per chip, the clock rate, and on chip cache allocation of high-end microprocessors from 1989 to 2005. Though the growth of first-level on chip was slower, it never led to an increase in the miss rate for all codes. Smaller chip cache used in the Intel Pentium 4 helped to serve several simultaneous requests by using several ports.