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Are three cores better than two?
Barbarian writes "That's the question that Tom's Hardware asked. They took a dual-cpu motherboard and stuck both a single and a dual core Opteron on the board, for a total of three cores. Does it work? Well, yes, when it's not crashing. It does raise the possibility of tri-core processors whilst we are waiting for the next die shrink."
If only you would lift the power supply 3 feet above the ground,.. Oh wait..
Today on /. 3 > 2!!! Tommorow 4 > 3!!
I thought the XBox CPU was a three-core jobby. I don't know if all the three cores are the same or whether thre are different sorts of cores for doing different sorts of things. Presumably, as long as you've got the correct glue, and can stick any number of cores on a chip. I don't think there's any need to stick (sorry!) to powers of two. Whether or not it works better efficiently becomes the issue... or rather the ability to market three vs two or four becomes the issue!
return 0; }
Doesn't the XBox 360 use a triple-core powerpc 970 processor or am I thoroughly mistaken?
George Wright
Why not try 4?
"Xbox 360 is a triple core, which is a pretty good indicator that this configuration is viable"
Wasn't XBox crashing constantly?
[sig]
That's just asking for trouble isn't it? Mixing a single core and a dual core.
Wouldn't you expect it to be more stable, and maybe actually work, with 2 dual core CPU's on a dualie?
Kinda having a wtf moment.
No Comment.
The question can't be answered.
In some markets, hardware is released and only then does software take advantage of it. Sometimes software never takes advantage of the new hardware because of the complexity in writing code. I remember all the MMX and the like promotions, but I never really saw any evidence that it did anything.
In other markets, software is released and the hardware follows. I recall Quake (or was it Quake 2) and the rush months later to have a Voodoo SLI to boost framerates.
I am sure a 3-core processor could be "better" but only if the software to support it can be easily ported from the single core or dual core versions. Will software eventually be core-transparent because of a "xCore" abstraction layer? Will software be optimized properly for the ability to take advantage of the added cores?
I see the need for multitasking the processor side, but I also see the complexity in trying to differentiate all the different configurations a workstation may have. The more cores that are released, the more I see application-specific turn key solutions over "one version fits all." I also see the added costs in testing and developing, and who really knows if those costs lead to any savings by creating the additional cores.
That's the point of this post -- just because something increases efficiency in one sphere doesn't mean that there is an overall savings. There is no way to properly judge if the market will see a savings overall, and if it costs much more to produce/support/service the new product, it will fail. Nothing can stop that, not even great marketing.
I'm sure using anything other than a power of two irritates the binary gods, at least use an even number.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Pages are loading pretty slow, here's the conclusion for those who don't want to wait:
As you could see, the fact that we used two rather different Opterons for putting together the triple core system had an impact on the benchmark results that was hard to predict. Performance depends on the level of a program's thread-optimization, but we also had a hard time with some particular benchmarks. Some did not work at all (AutoGK w/ DivX or Xvid, Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus). For others, performance was worse than that offered by a dual-core Opteron 275 configuration (such as with memory benchmarks, ScienceMark, WinRAR file compression and Windows Media Encoder). However, the majority of software we used was able to scale well thanks to the third core (which was the case with Cinebench 2003, PovRay 3.7, Cinema 4D R9 and 3DS Max 7).
MrRogers(2)
isnt even ready for multithreading yet.
Gaming is where the horsepower is needed in the consumer space - and most games aren't multithreaded. An additional core wont do much in terms of performance that a second core doesn't already accomplish. You're just wasting die space and decreasing yields.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Courtesy of Karma Whoring Copy-Paste technologies, Inc. (Patent Pending)
:P - no, this comment wasn't copy-pasted, doh. ]
---
Of course, we used our complete benchmark suite and we actually found some programs that were not working properly. Pinnacle Studio Plus 9.4.3 crashed repeatedly. Auto Gordian Knot, which we use for encoding DivX or XviD video, could not start the encoding process because it obviously was not able to access our AVI file. PCMark crashed sometimes right after finishing the compression test.
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The problems are due to two processors types that are very different. Although both run at a 2.2 GHz clock speed, the single- core Opteron 248 is based on the 130 nm Sledgehammer design, while the dual-core Opteron 275 is a 90 nm Venice dual- core chip.
These two processors do not only differ in the manufacturing process: Changes to the memory controller have been made during the transition from 130 to 90 nm and SSE3 extensions were added. Opteron 248 was designed for HT800 (200 MHz bus), while the Opteron 275 is capable of running HT1000. Finally, the cache size per core is different as well.
Picking processors for dual-CPU machines sometimes was difficult in the past, because these often had to be at least the same product type, if not identical in order to run. All these facts we listed now basically made it unlikely that our asymmetric system would even be able to boot.
The fact that it worked served to prove that a triple-core system based on the same cores would only offer better results.
Why would anyone even want to do this? Most dual proc systems are designed so that the CPUs must be the same for them to work properly. Sure, this configuration is a bit cheaper than using two dual core procs, but unless you have a space CPU sitting around I really don't see the point.
As a senior Death Star Engineer, I don't think this is such a good idea at all. Despire the Governor's claims that the rebellion poses no threat, having not one, but three massive vulnerabilities on our defenses is only asking for a "small, one-man fighter" to score a direct hit.
I am not sure if it was the configuration of the different CPUs, or just the ability of the operating system, but from the result charts there is significant improvement for graphics rendering applications but not as much for other applications. The benchmark tests showed significant improvement as well.
It would have been nice if they had tested the same CPUs in all of their tests, but overall I would say the more cores the better.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Combining a single-core and a dual-core on a 2-socket motherboard?
Yes, it might be asking for trouble, but they're doing it because they can. They're nerds, that's what they do. Maybe they shoulda dumped it in liquid nitrogen or put together a cool case mod...
On a more serious note, I worked with an outsourcing provider once that charged us per CPU, using tiered pricing for 1-3, 4-8, 9-15, etc. So, we actually asked a manufacturer if we could buy some 3-way systems.
Alan.
Three cores or two, Tom will need it for the dual-slashdotting today.
Hehe, reminds me of The Onions article about five razor blades vs four.. Interesting that they wrotes this WELL before a 5-blade razor ever came out
We're a slashdot crowd. As a rule, autistics aren't so hot on odd numbers.
Even, even, gotta be even...
First of all, they used Windows XP SP2. Why the fuck would you do that in a multicore test. Use an OS that can handle that many cores properly. XP definatly can't. Not bashing windows either. I mean if you are going to use a windows OS at least use 2003 server. And why just test one OS? Also, the triple core title is completely misleading. The AMD arch for multicore processors is much more than just two cores stuck in a single incasing (ala Intel's design). It's much more advanced and just sticking a 2nd cpu into a multicore setup is not analagous to adding another core to the tight multicore setup. It's adding a whole 'nother cpu.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
When you could have 3 billion cores?
The catch being that all 8 will only add up to 10ghz or so. Power usage will be quite low and you could get away with heatsink-only though
They use the POWER instruction set, so PPC linux will run on it, and who could say fairer than shoving 4 of these babies together on a board?
Downside would be waiting until 2008. Dual core is out next year and quad core in 2006, however.
Now who'd like a beowulf cluster of these? ;)
~HTP~ Hug that tux
At the end of 1996, I was at an INTEL conference for their new "Intel processors integrators" salling mode.
;-).
They where showing the "hot" new stuff, Pentium MMX. And their demo was: 16 bit sound at 44.1 Khz !, can you believe it !?!. As if that was not possible before !. C'mon I was having that sound quality with my DX4-100, even with a "slow" 386-40 (AMD) that was possible, in DOS with MOD Players
I don't know what that people was smoking, but I didn't think that _that_ was impressive. Maybe with the overhead of winblows 95, that wasn't possible, true... but fancy graphics and flying papaers never seemed to me the way to go.
The article refers to the system as "asymmetric" in a few places. This is not the case: SMP refers to a situation where all CPUs run a kernel, and each CPU schedules jobs for itself. In an AMP situation, one CPU is the "master" and the others are "slaves" which are scheduled, have interrupts and system calls managed by, and are otherwise controlled by the "master" CPU. It's possible to have an SMP tri-core system, and an AMP dual-core system.
It's just a matter of time, as well, it's not such a big deal to have your AI or actual render threads separated out. It's amazing what getting rid of a few context switches can do for performance.
The industry needs to standardize or at least agree on an optimal number of cores. What good is 2, 3, n # of cores if software doesn't support it?
Dual core is out next year and quad core in 2006, however.
Hate to break it to you, but this is 2005. Thus next year is actually 2006.
If someone mods this informative, I'll cry.
Well, yes, the crashing is a problem, so lets just agree that 3 Coors are better than two unless you're driving.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That sounds more like game programmers are wasting their time making games that don't make use of multiple CPUs. It's very clear that there are starting to be some limits reached in terms of what one CPU can do in a machine. There's a reason all these manufacturers are making dual core processors instead of making their processor faster. It's time for the programmers to change how they program.
So, I think your comment isn't very useful, since you try to tell hardware manufacturer's that they're doing useless things instead of making the single CPU faster. And that's not true at all. It's the game programmers that are doing stupid things. Going from 1 to 2 is would've been hard to deal with before it happened. But once you have, going from 2 to x is much easier. So, testing out three and more core systems is pretty useful.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Why cant we just have a single core which runs extremely fast with like 5 mb of L2. We cant forget that FX-57 beats a lot of the dual core CPUs
So, it runs, well enough even to perform some benchmarks. Nice. But what's the point of actually reporting them? It's relevance is like me reporting acceleration figures for my car when it's dragging seven steel bathtubs on a gravel road. Who would ever consider actually doing this with their own car(/tubs)?
But does it run Linux and goto 11?
I like muppets.
These two processors do not only differ in the manufacturing process: Changes to the memory controller have been made during the transition from 130 to 90 nm and SSE3 extensions were added. Opteron 248 was designed for HT800 (200 MHz bus), while the Opteron 275 is capable of running HT1000. Finally, the cache size per core is different as well.
My guess is the crashing programs are detecting SSE3 and when a thread that uses it runs in the single core processor, the application is killed for trying an "illegal instruction."
a Beowulf cluster of cores in a single chip!
We have tested a car with three tires instead of four. Does it work? Well, yes, when it's not crashing.
This is got to be one of the most pointless experiments ever done. Does it work? Yes it works when it's design to work, like the XBox 360. SMP stands for SYMETRICAL MULTIPROCESSOR. A dual core and a single core are not symetrical
please excuse my apathy
Why not setup one core heavily interger optimized, and one floating point? That way you can run the FP apps like rockets, and the interger apps like lightning w/o comprimizing on either. Rather than have a long chain in the pipeline you could have paralell paths, and once an instruction is set down one path, the CPU could take the next and see if it can stick it down another path.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
...on Tom's multi-page reviews.
I hate sites where the article occupies less than 10% of the screen area.
Need more than 2 CPU cores? Dont want to wait 5 more years for it? ... http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index. xml Sun to the rescue...
Look what failed. Video compression programs, the type of code almost certain to use streaming SIMD operations.
Try this with two identical dual processors and you should get a nice 4-CPU machine.
Opteron systems aren't SMP. They're NUMA.
In theory, the ability to run to chips of different speeds was there even in the Athlon MP, as it had independant busses from the morthbridge. In practice, it didn't work very well, either.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Most games created are for people with one cpu in their system, why bother wasting time developing for a dual core system when only 1% of your customers will use it?
did you forget to take your meds?
Apparently it's the mammoth power brick which causes most of the problems, coupled with people putting it in areas without good circulation (not necessarily the consumers fault... most entertainment centers are kinda cramped). Microsoft is saying that the defect rate is 3%, I'd believe something closer to 6%, but that is actually not out of the ordinary for consumer electronics.
So, in my mind, the "viability" issues of three cores has been answered with the 360. And in fact there are Power Mac configurations that effectively give you 4 cores (2x dual-cores). However, the bigger question is whether it will be advantageous .
With that in mind the 360 is a pretty good test-bed to see 3-core configs are worthwhile. Developers will have more incentive to exploit the potential with the assurance that the hardware will remain relatively constant (at least as far as the API is concerned... hopefully Microsoft will be able to come out with a more compact 360 in a few years).
Just because you can mix different cores on a 940 mb doesn't mean you should. Have they tried a Quad Damage (2x dual core) yet?
The chances that they will ever make 3 cores is rather small. When dual core (or quad core) become the standard, they will probably keep tweaking them in a ratio of 2 (due to design costs). This means, that you will see: one core, dual core, quad core, ...
greets,
devguy
It's not that rewarding because the memory bandwidth and low-latency local memory must increase as well to be able to feed the computations. In fact, I will guess that even at a massive 25.6 GB/s bandwidth on the PS3, a properly architected game will still be bus-bound.
So, in the short term parallelization will take the form of tasks that are compute-heavy and don't need to be sync'ed. Cool particles, or cloth sims, or asset streaming and decompression. Then it's a diminishing returns game as we move from 4 procs to n.
I know replies have probably already covered this, but here it is one more time. The Xbox 360 uses 3 PowerPC cores (kind of funny for Microsoft to use PowerPC CPUs isn't it?). The new Xbox has major problems with heat, which can also be attributed to the power supply adding to the mess. A previous story said that at least one person was hanging his power supply by a string to help out, which is ridiculous.
We have hit a brick wall so to speak at which processors have been limited. There needs to be major changes in the way that the dies are manufactured before we can attain much higher speeds while keeping stability. One option is to stop using silicon to produce the circuitry, however thus far there are no economical solutions.
If you really need the extra processor power, network a couple of computers together and configure them to share their resources. This takes up more space, but is the only realistic answer that I can think of right now.
It may be 1% today.
It will most likely be 25% in 12 months. Well, 90% if you count PS3 and Xbox 360.
Trust me, current games under development for release mid-2006 or later are looking at this (as are everyone developing anything for future consoles). They have to - competition will pwn their ass with much shinyer games that take advantage of the extra hardware, and their product will look dated if they don't do the same thing.
Due to long development times, most of the games out now do not benefit, but that will change - rapidly. We've already seen first ones that clearly benefit (City of Villains uses and benefits noticeably, assuming your videcard is modern enough so it's not limited by it).
Is a frikken shark with 3 frikken laser beams on its head better than a frikken shark with 2 frikken laser beams on its head?
Better yet, a shark with 3 heads each with a laser beam!
Good luck trying that. If you bothered to actually look at the design of the CPU, you would notice that it completely lacks a bus it could use to talk to other CPU's in SMP-configurations. It has GigE, 10GigE and PCI-Express-buses for communicating with outside world, and none of those is ideal for CPU - CPU communication.
So one CPU (granted: with several cores) per system is all you will get. Unless you are building a cluster, but that's a different thing altogether.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I was trying to figure out why Tomshardware was loading so slowly earlier this morning and lo and behold, if it isn't the slashdot effect in full force!
If you have a dual processor system with two single core processors and find yourself needing a bit more, swapping one for a dual core is the cheapest way to upgrade.
there is a reason why things tend to go as powers of two in
computer architectures. think about it, it will probably
come to you.
given that there is a general crossbar between the processors
and the memory units in the amd processors, this probably
doesn't need to be such a problem here.
but having a non power-of-two factor anywhere really screws
alot of things up. even seen a 3GB ram? a 37 bit bus?
a 27 element register file? (alright, forget this last one,
x86 is a mess)
i agree with the other posters, there must be something better
for these people to spend their time on.
OK, I read the fine article, and I now have a question...
Because they are running two different chips that have different cores and memory controllers, etc. I was wondering if they thought about running the two chips in opposite slots to see if there was a difference in performance. I imagine that there may be differences, perhaps even significant ones.
I'd get the same effect if I tried driving my car on the freeway with three wheels.
Just a pointless observation. I'm good at those.
My home news/mail/web server is tri-processor Sparc 20. One dual processor hypersparc 120 board and a second single processor board of the same type. Asside from parallel makes it is pretty rare to get all 3 processors crunching at the same time, but it works fine. Uptime is mostly limited by hardware upgrades and power failures.
But apparently the mods are on crack again.
(This post, on the other hand, is flamebait)
Four cores and HUGE caches and HUGE throughput.
PC's are still suckin wind behind the big RISC iron.
Someday PC's will speed up.
I didn't say anything about Zero Coors, so your comment is suspect. It could well be that Zero Coor is better than any positive number of Coors, but that three Coors is still better than two Coors, couldn't it?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It used to be fairly common to install a 3rd processor in any Windows based SMP machine for redundancy.
Because Windows had a seperate HAL for single, and multi processor configurations the machine would not be able to function with a single processor without a reinstall of the OS. I think this scenario is handled fairly well now but having 3 processors meant that you could loose one and the machine would still be able to boot in years past.
Just as it's only by convention that computers use binary (they could use any imaginable base representation)
;)), but how would we use any representation other than binary? Do we have transistor logic that can do base three, or any other base? Isn't it all based on logic gates, which are inherently binary?
This may be my lack of knowledge about computer engineering (despite my CS degree
This is, ofcourse, ignoring the research into quantum computing -- because I don't consider that as within the reach of general-use tech yet.
Seven, I've always liked Seven.....
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Because 3 minutes in heaven is better than 2 minutes in heaven...?
"I don't get it. Well, I could ride it to the store, I guess."
The video card makers can offload the vertex "shader" stuff back to a thread on the main CPU. Then you get a cheaper GPU by making use of the second/third core. Yes, this is a step in the wrong direction for them - moving graphics back to the CPU ;-) Maybe Intel will do it with their integrated graphics - or did they drop that stuff?
I've been using a Sun E450 with 3 processors for the better part of 5-6 years. Not sure how well it "balances" the load, but when I use TOP it seems to indicate that Solaris is in fact spreading the load appropriately.
Dang... no mod points... ;-)
I'd rather be flying
FYI BITCHES: PS3 is 9 core
I'm guessing there could be a lot done with AI that wouldn't require heavy communication between the different AI components. So, with careful design, most of the AI could fit in L1 cache andd be executed by one core without any bandwidth constraints.
Automota based models for physics engines might also be able to make good use of large numbers of parallel processors. I bet there are some interesting techniques for this in the scientific supercomuting sector that I don't know about yet.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Your honor, this may *seem* offtopic at first, but I do have a point to make.
I think that the Open Source community has proven that anything will work given enough engineering hours. Case and point; I was at Phreaknic many moons ago and saw a TRS-80 running Debian. Yay!... but now what? Would you use your Debian-laced TRS-80 to do someting? (not knockin' it.. it was actually pretty cool, but it's a pertinent example towards my point)
Just as Debian was able to be loaded on the TRS-80, a tri-core setup will, in all likelyhood, benchmark better than a dual setup assuming that the tri-core configuration can be stabilized (which I don't doubt is possible) and the application(s) are optimized for multiple processors. Ok, by proving that, what have we accomplished? 3 are better than 2? Of course 3 are better than 2. I personally think that a *good* question to ask would be: Are there advantages to using 3 versus 4? Or what advantages could you leverage from a 2 + 1 configuration?
Bottom line: Did you really have to do an experiment to test that?
Seems like one of those "chickens prefer beautiful humans" research projects. Google it; the research project is there.
This message was posted using recycled electrons.
Most computers these days have an odd number of CPUs...
Maybe it's really an experiment to test a quantum cpu configuration: 1 core for on, 1 - off, and 1 that cant be determined? My head imploded when I read my first QM book and lost faith in the chair I sit--the floor is really hard when you don't expect it. I think the instability is just uncertainty manifest--it's all voodoo to me anyway
An action well conceived is bold in so far as the risks are understood.
Running dual dual cores is better. Running a single core and a dual core sounds stupid. They need to get out of America.
The 2 + 1 configuration RARELY surpasses the standalone dual core. Suspisciously, it ALMOST ALWAYS ties or somehow does worse on benchmark tests ... 3D rendering seems to be the only time it surpasses.'
OK, TH says that the config is successful, but it really isn't for most applications. Think about this - you get minimal performance gain for a huge price (two CPU's AND a dual CPU mobo). There's no reason to do this at all.
Since I first heard about SMP years ago (and I'm no hardware supertech by any means) I've wondered about the possibility of a specialized dual or triple core CPU.
My idea was originally as a single chip that is exclusive to the OS and another, and much better chip, for the applications running on the OS. Both chips on the same die. I also envisioned a ram disk for caching the OS for even faster performance as an expansion card. Now with working dual-cores of the same type would it be possible to have a slightly less powerful chip also on the same die and have that chip only accessable by the OS?
It would seem a viable way to have optimum performance given that clock cycles are never diverted from existing applications for OS resources. With many specialized (graphics, sound) aspects of computing getting their own processors why not extend that idea to the OS.
Can any techno guru's chime in on this please?
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
Honestly, if they where writing a serious piece they'd play with something like a quad dual-core setup. Imaginary savings aside (and previously mentioned SSE snafu) this 3 cpu setup doesn't have any purpose. But I bet it sure as hell made their advertisers happy.
Quack, quack.
Ok, here's a proof by induction gone the wrong way: this gives the chipmakers an opportunity to relax => killing the competition (that is the main source of innovation nowadays) => undermining the basis of technical progress. Just like Windows does in software - do not perfectionize, bloat!
Please note that "TriCore" is a brand name (of Infineon, formerly Siemens Microelectronics).
It is an instruction set architecture (and a set of CPU cores that implement it). It is "Tri" core because it:
1) is a RISC architecture (for high crunch in low footprint) which
2) has instructions and data paths to do DSP work efficiently and
3) has the interrupt / task switching mechanisms to do real-time controller work efficiently, as well.
this gives ASIC designers a core that handles all three major sorts of embedded processing well in one package.
I suggest we stick to "triple core" (as most of the posters so far have) to avoid confusion between a chip with three cores and this branded single core that does three jobs well.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mean, they tried 2 single core cpus, and they tried 1 dual core cpu. And then they mixed those two to make the "3 core" cpu. And then for the last test they used a 1 single core cpu? I don't get it. That makes no sense. I don't care about the performance of 1 single core cpu, I'd rather see 2 dual core cpus. I'd like to see the difference between 3 and 4 cores, please. So that we can see if there is any advantage whatsoever of using 3 cores in the first place.
Does it run MacOsX ?
8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
These are basically the oddest benchmarks I've seen in a while, and nobody even seems to notice. Take for instance the "Cinema 4D R9" test; single Opteron, dual Opteron and dual-core Opteron are basically tied (the singe single-core is even a tiny bit faster!), but dual-core+single-core Opteron is a lot faster... Shouldn't such oddities (and that's not an isolated case) be at least commented on and explained in some sort of way if you want people to buy into your statistics at all? And why didn't they benchmark the rather obvious configuration of two dual-core CPUs?
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
And write non-bloated optimized code... nah. It will never happen.
Sun has released its T1 chip which boasts 8 cores capable of running 4 threads each. As mentioned on slashdot before, its considered a "green" chip becuase it only requires aprox. 70 watts to run (think lightbulb). Sun has a 2U server with this chip, 32 Gigs of ram and 2 SAS drives all for around (or under) $30k. This is complete redesigning my future datacenter planning. Oh yeah. I forgot to mention, This is shipping now and runs only Solaris 10.
Roughly 1990 I had the opportunity to see Intel's IA roadmap.
At the time, having the floating-point and integer cores integrated into a single uP was pretty heady stuff, and counted as integrated multiprocessing.
They showed the beginnings of their plan to put multiple parallel cores on the same die.
The roadmap showed CPU chips going to 3 cores, then 4, and so on. Up to 7, iirc.
It never quite happened that way. VLIW and then 64-bit seem to have replaced that path. But no doubt someone will resurrect it as the need to amplify the power curve will never go away.
in two player mode, or with a rearview mirror, etc.
A game I bought last week uses about 60%-70% of half a screen per viewport in two player mode. I imagine that multiple viewport environments would benefit greatly from extra cores. IANAGD (I Am Not A Game Developer), but ratios like that tell me that dedicating seperate cores to seperate players would result in a significant improvement.
Some games I've played split the screen down the middle and don't sort their verticies: they just calculate everything in the battle arena and just draw throw them at the graphics engine with two different viewpoints. When you've got big moving objects (that hide smaller objects)) to jump over to get to the other team, the slowdown from not sorting your verticies is quite noticeable. (It was only at 30fps to begin with in 1P mode. 2P was almost unplayable.) With extra cores there is no reason why you can't have your graphics engine in another process/core and assign it the lower half (or side) of the screen.
There's no reason why you need to use a GPU anyway. I've seen Tomb Raider (DOS demo ver.) run a 486DX2/66 without hardware acceleration and keep up a decent frame rate. Software renderers would be very quick to port to SMP environments if you do it right.
I was taught that a prime has exactly 2 factors, 1 and itself. One Isn't a prime because it only has
one factor: "1". I think it becomes important when we start multiplying primes together. I was never _completely_ satisfied with with distintion myself, so I would like to hear from an maths expert!
Oh, and just for the record, my top post, I _did_ mean to say xbox360. Sorry about the confusion!
return 0; }
It's obvious that 1 core processes zeros and ones, while in a two-core system one core processes zeros and the other works with ones.
Using the probability theory you can prove that there are about equal quantities of both zeros and ones in any set of data, and because of that the cores are about equally loaded
Now for the tricky part: in a three-core system core A works with zeros, core B works with ones and core C works with either zeros or ones. Obviously, this causes uncertainty and instability.
(DISCLAIMER: I'm not being serious).
What's up with these new servers from Sun that have 8 cores and run cooler? I think they call them CoolThreads.