In addition, having basic management capabilities hardwired into silicon will make it simpler for new entrepreneurial systems management companies to add product offerings that can rapidly be adopted by IT professionals and integrated in enterprise-level applications, RedMonk's Cote says.

For its part, Intel calls its effort Embedded IT, and is attacking the problem with a variety of new or planned capabilities. Competitor AMD has similar efforts within its Trinity and Torrenza programs.

Measuring success: Not so fast

The biggest boost to processor performance in the last two years has been the move to multicore processors. The migration from single-core to dual-core processors within the x86 market provided direct performance gains of 80 percent or more, and the first quad-core processors from Intel are providing another 50 percent improvement, says Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. How much hardware-assisted features or embedded IT will add to performance is debatable, with the real measure of worth to be determine by how the efforts improve such things as manageability.

"The ultimate test is whether it works for the IT professional for their specific application," Brookwood says. "Things like embedded IT are really designed to increase functionality rather than performance."