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Intel Skulltrail Benchmark and Analysis
Tom's Hardware has a detailed benchmark and analysis of Intel's new Skulltrail offering, taking a look at 8 vs 4 cores. The comparison uses games, A/V applications, office applications, and 3D rendering tools to help demonstrate benchmarks. "We were disappointed by the Skulltrail platform. Although we have tested and reviewed numerous Intel products, we have never had such a half-baked system such as this in our labs. If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that all we have to base this conclusion on is the Skulltrail system itself in its current state, which Intel provided as an official review platform. We do not know whether Intel plans to revise and improve the platform before the final versions ship to retail."
that is very important
Are these games and benchmarks actually making.. you know.. use of all the 8 cores? i.e. were they modified so that they can make use of multicores efficiently.
Multicore machines are useful when either you run multiple applications or if you want to run single app and make use of the cores, then the apps have to be updated so that they can make use of these multiple cores.
Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.
Here is what the article says:
To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.
Read The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley which has the description of why, this time, there is no getting around parallel programming.
Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.
what?!? an 8-core machine doesn't run single-threaded benchmarks any faster than a 1 core? that's crazy! what a revolution! what's next? we'll discover that 9 women can't create a baby in one month?!?
shocked, i tell you! shocked!
http://kered.org
At the bottom of the linked page I saw "Page 1 of 25" and I gave up. Bad submitter! Bad! Bad!
I'm not familiar with writing games on a multi-core game system a la the PS3, but I have written multi-threaded apps in Windows and I can tell you that the answer is:
Maybe.
The problem is that your app might be multi-threaded up the wazoo, but you're at the mercy of the OS (Windows here) to actually put the threads on separate processors/cores. You can *request* a thread on a separate processor (SetProcessorAffinity(), if I recall..it's been awhile), but the docs state that this is merely a request, and the operating system is free to ignore it if it thinks it can do better. A lot of time I observed that Windows doled out threads to other processors very grudgingly, and I was told that it's because to Windows, the overhead of keeping track of what thread is on what processor was, under a lot of circumstances, more expensive (read: slower) than if it just kept them all on processor 0 and just context-switched (which it was going to be doing anyway)
Most games have been, as I've seen, multi-threaded for awhile now; the complexity of these games means they'd have an event loop that's a million lines long if they didn't (and probably do anyway), but your performance is always going to be only as good as the hardware, and the operating system, let you.
At this point 2 cores is about all you'll really useful in a gaming rig. A lot of games are still single thread, especially old ones. However there are a good number of games out there that can make efficient use of 2 cores. Past that, it gets questionable. There are some games that claim quad core support, but in general it seems they don't make efficient use of it yet. Thus far, I've never seen any game that claims 8 core support, much less any benchmarks to back it up.
I think this is mostly targeted at the "My ePenis is bigger than yours," crowd. There are a non-trivial number of people out there who are willing to just drop obscene amounts of money on gaming rigs, and Intel wants to suck every dollar they can out of their pockets.
Same sort of deal with nVidia's new triple SLI boards. At this point even 2 card SLI isn't a great idea because it costs so much (literally twice what a single card does) and the benefits aren't that great. There isn't a lot of need for 3 card SLI. However, people will spend the money, so nVidia will happily make a product to take it from them.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.