One thing that I am really curious about is why CPU prices have seemingly stopped dropping? Many years ago, I distinctly remember that as clock speeds doubled (e.g. from 1GHz to 2GHz), the price per GHz would half (keeping prices of CPUs stable)... So why is it that prices of n-core CPUs seem to be growing linearly with n?<p>Is it because demand is higher for CPUs with low core-counts? I understand this argument in the consumer PC space, but what about in the datacenter?<p>Maybe companies which operate datacenters are too focused on horizontal scalability and stopped caring about vertical scalability? Surely this will change in the future? There are factors like power consumption and floor realestate to consider - From an electricity and realestate perspective, it is increasingly efficient to run your software on as few machines as possible (each machine having more CPU cores).<p>Am I right to believe that eventually companies will start writing&#x2F;using software which leverages multiple CPU cores (when the cost benefits outweigh the hassle)?<p>Why is it not popular to scale both horizontally AND vertically?<p>I would be really interested in hearing ideas.<p>I started thinking about this after noticing that Amazon EC2 instance prices grew linearly as you doubled memory and CPU resources... I expected a sub-linear growth.