The inexorable and exponential improvements in PC and server hardware are nothing new. Yet early generations of x86 hardware barely kept up with software’s added demands, leading to something of a performance standoff: Systems became more powerful, but new application and OS functionality soaked up every CPU cycle. Despite software vendors bloating their products with often unused and unneeded “features,” those days of software-hardware parity are over.
According to Gary Chen, research manager at IDC, “a single OS installation has difficulty using all the power [of] a multicore system,” a situation that means the typical server runs at an average utilization of somewhere between 10 and 35%.
