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Basic remarks on parallel computing

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Parallel computing is a type of computation in which two or more computations are executed at the same time. The concept is well established in computer science and engineering, but there are lots of misunderstandings from general public in general forums, blogs, social media, and comments sections of news sites. I see very often that people believes that multithreading is the only type of parallel computing, and completely unaware that a twelve core CPU can be faster than a thirty two core CPU, if the twelve core CPU has four times better SIMD hardware. I also see very often people believing that everything can be made parallel; this belief is accompanied by unfair accusations that game developers are " lazy ", as the reason why games do not scale to thirty two cores today. A similar accusation is made to CPU engineers, with people thinking that x86 CPUs have increased IPC only by about 5% during last generations because engineers " rested on laurels ". Such accu