[gameprogrammer] Re: 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 20:49:21 -0600
On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 22:46 +0000, Robert Chafer wrote:
> Very interesting question, and not only for games programming. Not
> only is thread programming poorly understood (generally) and ...
> difficult.
Yes!
> Also, the multi-core technologies will allow threading
> models that are really completely different to current ones. The close
> coupling of the cores will mean very (very) fast signalling and
> sharing of information.
Very interesting point. You are correct, due to being on the same chip
and perhaps sharing a common cache interprocessor signaling times will
drop to an all time low. Hmmm, what does that mean? I think it means
that it will be practical to use threads for very fine grained tasks.
Gotta think about that one. Thanks for point this out.
Bob Pendleton
>
> On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:46:03 -0600, you wrote:
>
> >
> > 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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> >
>
> --
>
> Rob Chafer
> Silverfrost
>
>
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