Yup... you read right!

http://news.com.com/Intel+pled ... /2100-1006_3-6119618.html

Can you imagine racing sims on that? It'd probably be a really good idea, right about now, to code such things in a way that you can up the resolution/accuracy/etc of they physics engine in many respects with the change of a few variables, I think.

Can't the physics engine be split in more than one core? Aero, Suspension, drivetrain...

Anyone knows?

I can see it being done automatically by the OS/hardware at some point...

I can see it automatically fail hard.

And increasing number of coder suicides as no-one has a clue how to program for such immensively distorted and complex CPU architecture. Until someone programs a program to build millions and millions lines of code, we ain't gonna get nuthin' useful out of that.

I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

I think it is not ment to improve the execution on one program, but running multiple programs at the same time. You might think what bo****ks, i never run more than 1 program at the time. Well type ctrl+alt+del and see the process list and count them. Usually people have at least firewall and anti virus scanner running at the background.

Currently not so many games are coded so that you could get so much benefit from N cores.

I did read there is some software out there (or rather, either being made or pure conceptual atm) that makes multile cores appear as one, so all programs can reap the benefit of the performance. Obviously it will have limits, but thought it was an interesting concept none-the-less.

Could be. Haven't heard though.

But multicore thingie still improves single process too. That's because in single core (or less cores than processes/threads), the system constantly swaps the processes between processor and memory as only one can be executed at the time. With more cores (or even HT) this should happen less often. With 80 cores, maybe some core could be even devoted to one single resource hungry process (like LFS?) (not in program code but in system scheduler).

Quote :

Can't the physics engine be split in more than one core? Aero, Suspension, drivetrain...

Small problem:
Two threads may never and at no time both have access to the same variable. That can cause problems with one thread reading the variable while the other is writing to it. In other word's your trying to read a text that someone is changing as you read. That means you don't read anything and things turn wrong.
Thus no two cores may work on two things that are only remotely connected unless you have the cores work one after another, which equals 0% performance gain.
In your example that would mean that core one calculates collisions. Thus it says "All these variables about position and speed of all vehicles are now mine, don't modify them, I need to read them". Core two, three and four would like to use these variables to calculate aerodynamics, drivetrain and tyres, but they'll have to wait. When core one is finished one of the other cores says "Now it's my turn, I read these variables now!" and the other cores have to wait now. This all works within milliseconds, but you can easily see that using this approach more than two cores are pretty useless.

Vain

Quote from spankmeyer :

I can see it automatically fail hard.

And increasing number of coder suicides as no-one has a clue how to program for such immensively distorted and complex CPU architecture. Until someone programs a program to build millions and millions lines of code, we ain't gonna get nuthin' useful out of that.

I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

Hence is why the ps3 will go down in a ball of flames, developers have cried out about how annoying and difficult it is to code for the ps3.

I don't see 80 cores in a desktop machine happening in 5 years tbh. The server market perhaps. Hmm, apache with the worker or event (or perchild, if thats ever off the ground) mpms would be very interesting. That would certainly scale.

The alternative is that if they do get 80 cores in 1 die, then you can guarantee that you'll see drastically lower clock speeds (which is cool (no pun intended) with me), and more highly threaded apps. The underlying [desktop] OS does need to understand how to load balance the cores properly though.

Quote from Eldanor :

Can't the physics engine be split in more than one core? Aero, Suspension, drivetrain...

Anyone knows?

No, not until someone finds a clever solution to this....But multi cpu's can share the cars on the track..For example if there are 4 cars including you, one core can do 2 cars, and the other core does the other 2 cars...Am i wrong?