The Economist: Business’s Digital Black Cloud

“Complicating matters even further, servers these days tend to
have more than one processor inside them. The wholesale endorsement
of Linux, the open-source operating system for Pentium-style
processors, by the world’s leading hardware and software firms
(with the exception of Microsoft) has turned it into a formidable
platform for enterprise servers capable of ganging dozens, even
hundreds, of internal processors together into a giant ‘symmetric
multiprocessing’ unit that behaves as a single entity. Add
multicores to multiprocessors, and today’s software licensing
policies quickly become untenable…”

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