I spend most of my time dealing with large sites. They're always hungry for more horsepower, especially if they can serve more visitors with the same power draw. Power goes up much faster with more chassis than with more CPU core. Not to mention, administrative overhead tends to scale with the number of hosts, not the number of cores. For them, multicore is a dream come true.

I ran into an interesting situation the other day, on the other end of the spectrum.

One of my team was working with a client that had relatively modest traffic levels. They're in a mature industry with a solid, but not rabid, customer base. Their web traffic needs could easily be served by one Apache server running one CPU and a couple of gigs of RAM.

The smallest configuration we could offer, and still maintain SLAs, was two hosts, with a total of 8 CPU cores running at 2 GHz, 32 gigs of RAM, and 4 fast Ethernet ports.

Of course that's oversized! Of course it's going to cost more than it should! But at this point in time, if we're talking about dedicated boxes, that's the smallest configuration we can offer! (Barring some creative engineering, like using fully depreciated "classics" hardware that's off its original lease, but still has a year or two before EOL.)

As CPUs get more cores, the minimum configuration is going to become more and more powerful. The quantum of computing is getting large.

Not every application will need it, and that's another reason I think private clouds make a lot of sense. Companies can buy big boxes, then allocate them to specific applications in fractions. Gains cost efficiency in adminstration, power, and space consumption (though not heat production!) while still letting business units optimize their capacity downward to meet their actual demand.