Today, very few PC processors are sold with single cores, and that number is dwindling down to zero. And one of the largest commercial server operating systems, Windows Server, just last week added a virtualization platform as a principle option for all customers.

But the problem now is adoption. For enterprises, there's a certain fear that the separation of contexts between the application that runs and the processor that runs it, will generate unmanageable levels of complexity among administrators. And while it might seem that the whole multicore adoption problem has already been solved, and quite handily -- Intel has already marched on to the 45 nm generation, and AMD is running along to catch up -- the often unspoken truth there is that developers have yet to adopt the mindset for parallelism. So there's a limit to how well processors can subdivide tasks into threads, and unless developers start helping out, each new "power of two" heaped onto the number of cores in a CPU, may matter less and less.

Last week in Los Angeles, Microsoft convened a panel of seven leading IT industry executives including its own server and tools division senior vice president, Bob Muglia, and moderated by IDC research vice president Al Gillen. The broad topic at hand was "the data center of the future," though as the conversation was allowed to meander, it eventually centered on two factors, both of which revealed the same hard truth: Adoption is running further and further behind production.