Multi-core processors may replace physics cards, says Intel

[Guest]

In what promises to be one of the main themes of the Intel Developer Forum, Intel touted the virtues of quad-core gaming to members of the press, during a pre-show, "extreme multi-threaded" benchmarking session. Despite current programming challenges, quad-core CPUs will accelerate games and even enable physics effects without the need of an add-in card, Intel promises.

Multi-core processors may replace physics cards, says Intel : Read more

 

[twelch82]

It can be done; I even expect it to be done a lot more now that we're looking at 8-core processors in the new consoles that are not that fast on a per-core basis. Even the core logic can be multithreaded in exchange for a bit of extra programming work and some extra memory usage.

Code designed to be run multithreaded actually tends to be slower when running on a single core though, because there are certain things you have to do in a round-about way when running multithreaded that you could just do directly if you were running a single thread.

So extra memory usage, slightly slower single-threaded performance, more hoops to jump through as a programmer - it shouldn't be too surprising that developers didn't find a compelling case to jump into it headfirst for last generation consoles. The new consoles though have lots of cores and lots of memory, so the strategy will be different now.