Speaking to a summit of Microsoft's "Most Valued Professionals", a group of software technologists, marketing and sales people to whom Microsoft has awarded "MVP" status, Gates said the hardware community is doing its part by delivering more and more transistors.

At the beginning of a keynote speech to about 2000 MVPs assembled in Redmond, Washington, Gates said the opportunities for software had never been greater, with continued hardware improvements and momentum behind the use of the Internet.

"We've got the continued innovation of the hardware industry. That's often exemplified by the increase in transistors predicted by Moore's Law. No end in sight in terms of the doubling of power of the processor; in fact, now instead of giving us higher clock speed, they're giving us more processors," Gates said.

"And that's an interesting challenge because the ability to take multiple processors and use them in parallel has been a programming challenge going back many, many decades, so now it's important that we actually solve that problem, and make it possible for developers of all types to take advantage of these multicore devices," he added.

Gates predicted that within five years the typical desktop computer, which already has two processors, would have 16 or 32 processors with larger numbers of processors deployed on server computers.

Gates gave the keynote speech on March 13 and a transcript could be found here when this story was first posted.

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