Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> So there are hex-core Operons now, eh?

  I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
minority).

  About the only usage for multiple cores for the masses (rather than for
very small niche markets) is computer games which support multithreading.

  However, I wonder if anyone has actually benchmarked how well current
multithreading-supporting games scale up with increased amount of cores
(and processors). Expecting that doubling the number of cores will double
the refresh rate of the game is completely unrealistic wishful thinking.
I would be curious to know if anyone has actually benchmarked how much
games *really* benefit from additional cores.

  What I'm getting at is that if, let's say, increasing the amount of
cores from 2 to 6 only about doubles the refresh rate of the game, that's
kind of wasted resources and wasted money. It's like having 2 cores being
idle all the time.

  And of course there's a point after which a game will not benefit at
all from increased speed. A game refreshing at 100FPS or at 150FPS makes
absolutely no practical difference.

  So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
multithreaded rendering or video editing.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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