By: Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com), May 15, 2013 2:26 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on May 14, 2013 5:40 pm wrote:
> My point is that on a modern 4C desktop/laptop, the SMT support for 8T never gets used
> at all (or hardly ever gets used for anything that actually matters).
In 1983, multi-core and 32-bit (and 64-bit) was never used on 80x86, therefore it was a mistake for Intel to bother with things like paging, atomic instructions, APICs, etc. Surely they should have concentrated on making the fastest 8086 clone possible - if they had we could be running DOS on 4.2 GHz CPUs and really pounding that 640 KiB of RAM!
Notice how this is a very silly argument?
Current games are designed for 4 threads or less. This doesn't mean that games can't be designed to use 8 or more threads effectively; it only means that it takes time for software developers to get adapt to changes. It's a mistake to assume that future games can't or won't benefit from more hardware threads simply because older/existing games haven't tried.
- Brendan
> My point is that on a modern 4C desktop/laptop, the SMT support for 8T never gets used
> at all (or hardly ever gets used for anything that actually matters).
In 1983, multi-core and 32-bit (and 64-bit) was never used on 80x86, therefore it was a mistake for Intel to bother with things like paging, atomic instructions, APICs, etc. Surely they should have concentrated on making the fastest 8086 clone possible - if they had we could be running DOS on 4.2 GHz CPUs and really pounding that 640 KiB of RAM!
Notice how this is a very silly argument?
Current games are designed for 4 threads or less. This doesn't mean that games can't be designed to use 8 or more threads effectively; it only means that it takes time for software developers to get adapt to changes. It's a mistake to assume that future games can't or won't benefit from more hardware threads simply because older/existing games haven't tried.
- Brendan