The author pointed out a major trend in the processor technology that really becomes significant in this decade - the trend of going multicore. This trend can now be felt in pretty much any software niche. Personally, being in the embedded system space, my company has resisted the trend for quite a while until we could no longer pretend the other cores do not exist since no one is planning to make a faster uni-core chip!
Another point I got from this chapter is the human factor in the architecture selection. When choosing an architecture, should the architect consider the skill sets of his or her team? In this chapter, the architect is facing such dilemma. A highly parallel system would be the right way to go however the team lacks the expertise in parallel programming. Fortunately, the architect was able to cleverly design an architecture that mostly shields the parallelism from the developers. This makes a great compromise.
This hardware trend to go multicore will eventually push for more software systems to become parallel, however many software developers are still not comfortable with it. I would image such architecture that hides parallelism from the developers would gain popularity.
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