The Tech Report is looking at AMD's dual-core Opteron processors

MICROPROCESSORS ARE GETTING too hot, requiring too much power, and not delivering enough additional performance for it. That's the basic problem. The engine that's driven the microcomputer's incredible rise in capability over the past 30 years, Moore's Law, isn't quite out of steam yet, but some of its offshoots are on the ropes. CPU designers have nearly exhausted their collective bag of tricks to get more performance out of additional transistors on a chip by increasing parallelism at the instruction level. Speculative execution and deep pipelining are by now very standard features, and CPU designs are getting increasingly complex and hard to manage. When Gordon Moore's goose lays a golden egg and the number of transistors possible on a chip doubles, as it is supposed to do every 18 months, taking advantage of the windfall has proven increasingly difficult.

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