[gameprogrammer] What do the new processors mean for game programming?
- From: Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Gameprogrammer Mailing List <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:46:03 -0600
Processor used to get about 50% faster every year, for the last 4 or 5
years they have only been getting about 20% faster/year and the rate at
which they are getting faster is slowing down. If the rate had stayed
the same we would be buying 10GHz processors right now. Instead, you
can't even get a 4GHz processor. OTOH, the number of transistors you can
fit on a chip just keeps doubling every couple of years...
The result is that all the newest processors are 64 bit machines with
either hyperthreading, multiple cores, or both. That means that for the
foreseeable future if you want you code to run faster it has make use of
multiple threads.
It seems to me that most programming languages currently in use have
little to no built in support for multithreaded programming. Java is the
only one I can think of. Are you folks thinking about how to make use of
multiple processors in your games? What approaches are you using? What
libraries? Are any libraries really designed to help?
It just seems to me that this is a big change and that it isn't being
discussed anywhere. I have this horrible feeling that a lot of people
are going to buy brand new hyperthreading multicore motherboards and
then wonder why their favorite game doesn't run any faster than it used
to.
In fact, it is so completely ignored that I find many people with HT
Pentium 4s have hyperthreading turned off.
Bob Pendleton
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