Businesses also need to thoroughly evaluate the effects of software licensing as they move to servers with multicore processors, he explained. While Microsoft has already promised that it will continue to base its licenses on sockets and not the number of processing cores, the licensing path for other applications is not as clear.

"Each business needs to ensure they are not going to get hit with a big license upgrade fee as they move from two-core to four-core systems," Reynolds said.

In response, the chip makers say that licensing costs are not going to be a huge deal. "The big hump was in going from single to dual core, but now we have a pretty solid understanding of most licensing strategies in the market," said Pat Patla, director of Opteron marketing at AMD.

Stori Waugh, senior manager at Dell's server product group, said the company has been working closely with all major application and operating system vendors to advance the "license by socket, not by core" strategy. As many as 90 percent of software vendors will adopt a per-socket licensing model, she said.

Another question is how efficient software can be on multicore processors when the applications were designed for earlier generations of hardware. The processor manufacturers maintain that the bulk of the application optimization for multicore environments is done; they say it was completed during the transition from single- to dual-core systems.