Trying to boost the IT capabilities at his digital forensics company, Brian Dykstra invested in a quad-core processor-based server. After all, he figured, more cores means a more powerful machine that can do far more work than single-core systems.

However, after shelling out money for the new technology, Dykstra found that only one out of the four cores was working. Three-fourths of his hardware investment was sitting idle because the software he was running wasn't built to make use of multiple cores.

Dykstra isn't alone in his disappointment with the lack of software for multicore chips.  As hardware firms increase the number of cores in single chips, most software simply isn't keeping pace, creating a huge drag on efforts to take advantage of the potentially significant hardware-based performance improvements.

Software running on multicore chips must be built to let different cores handle different tasks in an application at the same time, significantly boosting performance.

Dykstra noted that while some server software from major vendors like Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp., has been partially multi-threaded , for the most part there is a dearth of such applications.

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