RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on May 11, 2013 4:39 pm wrote:

> 99% of desktop/laptop users are not running compilers at all. As for
> gaming, that's also rather a niche, and in any case I'm skeptical about
> whether current game engines show much benefit from running on 4C/8T
> rather than 4C/4T. Latency matters a lot for gaming, and I'm not at
> all sure that 8 slow threads are better than 4 fast ones.

It depends. If you have single-threaded game engine, you can probably hack it to make use of another thread, maybe a bit more. However, if you have an engine that can already make good use of four threads, then it can probably make use of more.

I'm not sure there are any major engines on PC that do use four threads efficiently, however[1]. The problem is that if you are targetting 2C/4T lowish end system (or some 1.2 GHz 2C/2T Core 2 Duo, which is still a lot faster than 1C/2T main core on PS3), there simply won't be anything for the extra cores or threads to do. You can only add some much eye candy. Once the extra power is used for gameplay stuff, you are upping the minimum requirement too. Currently, 8 thread processors are high-end, so targeting them is a bad business decision.

It will be interesting to see where PC gaming will be heading once PS4 and next Xbox are on market. Sony decided to go with 8 thread design (and very programmable GPU on top of that) instead of 4 thread design with more single-threaded oomph.

[1] You can always do something the engine wasn't meant to do and drive multi-threaded load up that way, but doing something stupid isn't interesting case.

-JLarja