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Intel's Dual-core strategy, 75% by end 2006
DigitumDei writes "Intel is moving ahead rapidly with their dual core chips, anticipating 75% of their chip sales to be dual core chips by the end of 2006. With AMD also starting to push their dual core solutions, how long until applications make full use of this. Some applications already make good use of multiple cpu's and of course multiple applications running at the same time instantly benifit. Yet the most cpu intensive applications for the average home machine, games, still mostly do not take advantage of this. When game manufacturers start to release games designed to take advantage of this, are we going to see a huge increase in game complexity/detail or is this benifit going to be less than Intel and AMD would have you believe?"
not automatically.
all else equal.. two cores, two times the power, two times the heat..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
AFAIK memory latency/bandwidth is currently the limiting factor in conmputation speed. Dual core processors will not change this, but make the gap even bigger.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. --Kosh
I don't know if it has been referenced here before, a very interesting and enlightening article : http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.ht m
The XBox2 and Gamecube are both already known to be using POWER/PowerPC derivatives. Besides which, chip contracts for new consoles are the sort of thing that get worked out an amount of time in advance measured in years, and they're usually not bought from quite the same stock that PC OEMs are buying from. Intel's plans for their mass market "by late 2006" lineup really couldn't have any impact on the console world at all at this moment.
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It did. It was dropped in Doom 3, as it really wasn't that much of a win for the effort.
Modern games are really limited by bandwidth or by GPU power. CPU power is only really used for game logic, which isn't terribly complex compared to the other parts of a game.
all else equal.. two cores, two times the power, two times the heat..
You haven't been paying attention! Go back and read this article again (about AMD's demo of their dual core processor). While you're at it, read the related /. article.
The dual core processors use nowhere near double the power and produce nowhere near double the heat.
-- Steve
I would think so! All the "big" chess computers (Deep Blue, etc...) have just been massively parallel systems, and chess is one of those things that people have been coding and refining for years. I'm not much of a chess player myself-- computers have been kicking my ass since the 1MHz era, but it appears that multiprocessor chess software is already available for end-users:
Deep Junior 9 and Deep Shredder 9 support multiple processors, and should have no trouble on a multicore system.
Each core doubles how many moves it can evaluate in a given time-- and searching possible moves is primarily how chess algorithms work.
Plus... Shredder renders a fancy 3D glass chess set for you, making sure your GPU doesn't get lonely with nothing to do.
In my experience doing performance tuning, most games tend to be CPU (and/or memory-bandwidth) bound on their common configurations. Sure, you can always concoct cases where this isn't true (e.g. slow video card in super-fast PC, insane resolutions or pathological scenes), but it does tend to be broadly the case.
This is partly because it's much easier to tune to a GPU budget. On the PC you can recommend different resolutions and/or anti-aliasing modes and instantly have a dramatic impact on fill-rate requirements without sustantially altering how your game plays. You can also add or remove polygons from models, and swap out shader effects until you get something that fits your budget on your target platform.
Tuning for CPU is more difficult, because making a sweeping change is likely to have gameplay impact and is harder to do. Changing how often or how deeply the AI thinks, or the level of sophistication of your physics system, is going to have an impact on gameplay, and is certainly a lot more programmer work than just telling your artists to remove a couple of lights. Coming up with more efficient algorithms that deliver identical results requires a lot more hard thinking - and time for that is limited.
Just like many other advancements in CPU, yes, people will be able to afford them, if not right away, pretty quickly.
I think the initial pricing for a dual core 2.8 GHz chip is about $250. 3.0 & 3.2GHz will be available at higher prices, I think an extra $100 per step.
When dual-core procs become the norm, Oracle will wonder why everybody stopped buying their software, and will adjust their pricing accordingly. Oracle has made a science out of accurately determining what price the market is actually willing to bear, just a smidgeon short of the market telling them to "F--- Off" and that's what their pricing structure will be. Oracle keeps the "riff raff" out of their customer base that way, and only wishes to deal with the serious players who must have their database when no others will do. It's kinda like the world of business jet aircraft... hideously expensive, but there is still enough market demand out there such that the vendors are barely able to keep up with it.
The problem is not the architecture but the OS. The perfomance impact on context switches is mostly in changing the memory space (TBL, cache flush). Just two people developed an OS that runs all programs in the same space, so the processor keeps running at full speed. It can do this because it's written in a safe language (Java, but could be C# or other) so nothing can write to arbitrary addresses.
Despite being written in Java by just two people instead of the thousands that wrote the Linux kernel and optimizing C compiler, it is 50% the speed doing actual work. For comparison, commercial JVMs generate code that ranges from 2x-5x faster than gcj (gcc's java compiler) so this OS could easily be much faster than Linux. The only hold-up is drivers and support for archaic C/UNIX style programs (they should put it into the linux kernel as a module and gradually replace linux code with sane OO code).
The Gameboy uses a Z80. The Xbox uses a Celeron.