> and my users asked for more performance yesterday (and the year before, and the year before that too, and likely the decade before that too). That made me th

> and my users asked for more performance yesterday (and the year before, and the year before that too, and likely the decade before that too). That made me think of the traditional response of throwing bigger and faster computers at a problem. The thing is, much of the performance of those bigger and faster computers comes from architectural optimizations that can only be fully exploited if the program takes advantage of them. In some cases, putting the code through an optimizing compiler may be enough. In other cases, the program needs to be explicitly designed to take advantage of those optimizations. (The cache is an okay example of this. There was a time when caches did not exist. The introduction of caches would have sped up some programs more than others, depending upon the program's design.)