But while the transistor budgets continue to increase, microprocessor designs began to hit a wall a few years ago in their ability to continue to accelerate the clock frequencies of those chips while keeping the heat produced at a manageable level. Digital Power Group, a Washington-based energy research firm, estimates that computers now consume about 10 percent of all the electricity generated in the U.S., a figure that could double by 2015. Legislation is being considered to force businesses and technology providers to reduce energy consumption.

By moving to multiple cores inside a single chip, processor manufacturers can reduce or maintain clock speeds and at the same time contain the associated heat generated. Overall performance can be dramatically boosted by doubling the available processing engines inside the same silicon real estate while maintaining stable power levels.

"It's really providing amazing new performance levels," said David Tuhy, a general manager at Intel's Business Client Group. "We're offering 50 percent more performance than our best dual-core processors, and it's four and half times the performance of our original single core Xeon. And the power didn't go up."

What's ahead

There seems to be no upper limit to the core escalation for the foreseeable future. Intel recently announced it has created a research chip with , which is expected to dissipate less energy than its current quad-core design. That chip is probably five to eight years away from commercialization, but other vendors are already hitting the market with "massively parallel" processor offerings.