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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."
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!
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Most game software is multithreaded. However, it is not multi-threaded in a way that will significantly increase performance given multiple cpus.
As one example, I worked on Diablo II, and it had at least 5 threads (there might have been even more, but I can remember what 5 threads did). I've talked to plenty of other people in the industry, and the story is the same everywhere: multithreaded, but not parallelized in the most cpu intensive areas.
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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.
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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).
Actually this parent should be modded down. SMP doesn't refer to dual or single core, it jsut referes to multiple CPUs in general and it doesn't matter how many of them there are. It should run on two as well as on three or fifteen (depending on the implementation of course). What is crap though is when different CPUs are used, because software most likely wont expect this, as has been already explained in another posting regarding SSE or other special optimized code. It's not surprising either, because mmost software would determine special features at startup and not at runtime. Having a special instruction set would beg the question if the performance gain is negated by constant checks if this feature is still there.