A single processor would be used at the start (the most significant digit).
"What our customers want most," he said, "is more speed in a single processor."
They had only a single slow processor and their memories were very small by comparison with today.
In typical implementations, a single processor may play one or more roles at the same time.
A compute year is how long it would take a single processor running at full utilization to do the same amount of work.
Most current operating systems can control the operations of only a single processor.
Economic limitations - it is increasingly expensive to make a single processor faster.
But if we just take the case of a single processor, this model actually works well no matter how many cores you have.
The more traditional approach has been a single processor or a few very fast processors working on the problem.
Microsoft has said they would treat a socket as a single processor.