See my comment above -- this is true now, but I believe it's because our software and programming methodology isn't flexible enough to use resources efficiently

See my comment above -- this is true now, but I believe it's because our software and programming methodology isn't flexible enough to use resources efficiently. Whenever you write code you're essentially hard-coding the balance between CPU and memory. It doesn't cause much of an issue on desktop machines, but with the growing number of data centers, it will start to be economical to have more flexibility in our code.