Intel Salivates Over Virtual World Processing Demands

CNet has up an article looking at the lucrative virtual world market for processor companies. An Intel developer forum held in San Francisco this week highlighted the opportunities for selling hardware to both consumers and vendors in the VW marketplace. "[Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner] showed statistics that indicated a PC's processor bumps up to 20 percent utilization while browsing the Web, while its graphics processor doesn't even break above 1 percent. But running Second Life--even with today's coarse graphics--pushes those to 70 percent for the main processor and 35 to 70 percent for the graphics processor, he said. The Google Maps Web site and Google Earth software pose intermediate demands. Running a virtual worlds server is vastly more computationally challenging, though, when compared with 2D Web sites and even massively multiplayer online games such as Eve Online. An Eve Online server can handle 34,420 users at a time, but Second Life maxes a server out with just 160 users."

Comments

Re:What really stiffens their niplples...

[Andy Dodd]

Nah, the article is just plain wrong and uses differing meanings for "server".

SL - "Server" appears to mean a single CPU or box
EVE - "Server" is used to describe the entirety of the Tranquility cluster, which has at least 150-200+ dual or quad-core blades that handle the solar systems, plus some serious database servers.

EVE can achieve around 150-200 on a single machine before things start getting laggy, things get massively painful in the 500-700 range, and much above that and nodes start dropping. EVE has an architecture limitation in that processing for a given solar system cannot be spread across multiple CPUs, so if a single solar system in EVE has 200+ players, they're all on the same CPU. Meanwhile, 10 systems with 5 users each will likely share a CPU, and 50 systems with zero users probably also share.