Edit : My first post to blow up. Crazy.
In: Technology
We do do this. Well, sort of. I work for a big hosting company. There’s both core count and speed, more cores makes for a bigger physical processor, more speed makes each core faster but heat up more, so whether you are upping the clock or adding more cores the whole proc is generating more heat. There’s a limit to having that much heat in a single space before things like melting (have seen this) happen. Usually what we do to pack more processing in a box is to get motherboards that can support multiple CPUs, dual socket is common and quad socket is somewhat, believe you can get 8 sockets even, each socket can support over a TB of memory too so they get pretty big. The problem is those mobos are expensive, the more you ramp a single system up the more exponentially the price rises. So what we’ve done server side is write our code in ways it can be split up and served across multiple servers instead of multiple cores, since they both take more work than a program that runs on a single core anyway.
As to why they don’t simply increase performance per core, takes a whole lot of engineering to make that happen, and either way you still deal with heat. It’s more practical to scale horizontally than vertically these days.
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