Originally Posted by Allen
Presumably, this means 32 cores are coming in the not so distant future, I ass-u-me. So, single or quad threaded games/software will become a thing of the past sooner than I expected, I speculate.


Absolutely not, because game development isn't and never has been based on the latest technology and core counts available from AMD or Intel. Doesn't the fact that both these companies have had quad core/8 thread chips out for desktops since ~2006 indicate that there is no correlation? You'd have thought that 11 years after the technology is available that they would be used by now........most of our games are still only using 1 or 2 CPUs are still aren't efficiently coded for multithreading, even for just 4 cores. It's the mass target audience and effort against return that game devs use when creating their titles, and the reason why PCs, regardless of the horsepower available will be limited by the console brethren who typically don't get hardware upgrades for years on end (although this is slowly changing on each console generation release where they are becoming more and more like a PC).

On top of that, it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of PC gamers that use the latest and highest core count CPUs in their gaming capable machines. No developer on earth is going to put their time, effort and resources into creating a game/sim that only supports that tiny minority.

I do see quad core chips being used more efficiently in the future, and the next step being 8 core...but that alignment again, will be geared around the next half-generation of consoles (i.e XOne) where PC development has (or should have) a much closer alignment. As for 16 core/32 thread coded games, in 10-15 years maybe......perhaps it depends on what your definition of 'not-so-distant' future actually is! But then I suspect that the CPU will become less and less important anyway and even more of the compute functionality will be integrated with the GPU as it becomes the heart of a typical PC and the CPU becomes secondary.


On the Eighth day God created Paratroopers and the Devil stood to attention.