Quad Core Chip Technology

Intel will increase its market share by the end of 2007 to 12.5 percent, keeping its place as the world’s top chipmaker, while rival Advanced Micro Devices will drop out of the top 10, research firm iSuppli predicted.

Samsung Electronics will remain the world’s second-biggest chipmaker with 7.4 percent of the market, while Toshiba will rise to third place, pushing Texas Instruments to number No. 4, iSuppli said.  Total semiconductor revenue is expected to reach $271 billion, up 4.1 percent from 2006. In September, iSuppli had said it expected the market to grow by 3.5 percent.

Sony has moved into eighth place from 14th in 2006 with a 57 percent increase in revenue, thanks to sales of chips for its PlayStation 3 game console. Toshiba’s higher revenue is also seen partly due to PlayStation 3 chip sales.  Infineon was expected to benefit from a booming market in mobile phones to rise to 10th place from 15th, thanks to its own strengthening wireless business.

After speaking with many developers including some big names, we learned that they can’t make much sense out of quad or more core CPUs. They confirm that they can put two cores to good use but not much more. The main problem is that the performance is far from scalable.   You have to spend both time and money to resource the programmer to try to make sense out f the dual core CPU. It takes up to a year to optimise the game for more threads and even if you make the perfect job you can count on twenty to thirty percent performance increase, and this is the best case scenario.   Once you start making the multi threaded game you end up making and having the multithreaded bugs as well.

You can keep one core busy with the physics and collision detection, second core will have to wait for the score to move on with the Artificial intelligence while the third core could possible calculate the graphic data. In this best case scenario you have to realise that the core number two and three would always have to wait for the core number one to finish its job and pass the job to the cores two and three. In this concept there is absolutely no place for quad core as games are non parallel applications. A game developer expert said that you can use the core number four to stream and load the data in the game and this is what the guys at Remedy did at IDF quad core demonstration. But this takes time and money and it is not commonly embraced by developers.

Game developers are in the dawn of dual core programming and now all the sudden AMD and Intel wants them to go quad core. For the time being Quad cores are good for rendering and serves but not for games.   So if you want to play games, you can forget about quad cores, you simply don’t need them and can gain just marginal performance out of them. Give the developers some time and this might change, but we are talking quarters not months.  My feeling is that game developers will come around and optimize for these new super face quads.