In large companies—those with tens of thousands of employees—the costs for running servers, power supplies and for cooling racks of very hot servers can run millions of dollars per year. While most applications still can’t be multithreaded across many different cores, they can be virtualized. Performance is less of an issue for many applications these days than the cost of power, so multicore machines work extremely well for consolidating many applications and operating systems (running on separate virtual machines) onto a single multicore server.
This isn’t a one-to-one mapping, of course. You don’t just add cores and run more applications. The bus needs to be widened, memory needs to be reconfigured, and there needs to be a prioritization of what applications get access to what resources on those chips. But the savings that can be achieved by boosting the utilization of servers and reducing the number of machines needed to run applications is immense.
