6 cores?

very little. Having that many cores is good for servers and digital video editing, primarily.
 
Having more than 2 cores hardly make a difference in gaming (Atleast for me). So I doubt that 6 cores will be an exception. Games just can't take the advantage of that many cores yet.
 
Just because Sup. Commander was coded like crap and needs extra cores, doesn't mean other games in the future will need them! ;) back at you.

Unfortunately, 6 cores mean nothing to 99% of people in here. :(

Then on top of that, 4 cores were "hard to kept fed" on the FSB. I'm guessing Dunnington is going to be on 1600FSB only as its going to require some massive bandwidth to keep 6 cores fed.

Seriously, 2 cores are barely getting used for most people.

All 4 are rarely used unless its a "professional" app thats been coded properly. (encoding, some 3D rendering, etc.)

I can't see 6 cores being of benefit to many people at all.
 
Isn't there a new game coming out based on the SupCom engine? Then we'd have two whole games that are more than dual core capable!
Expansion was out in like dec, I dont know of anything else from CT on that engine.

The reason for SupCom needing such power is the massive number of units and the AI to feed them, not so much sloppy coding. Its just plain hard to calc paths and decision trees for 3000 units at once...
 
It will sure make windows experience hell lot better. My 4400+ is struggling with vista 64.
 
It will sure make windows experience hell lot better. My 4400+ is struggling with vista 64.
Anything made by Intel will make your experience better. Then again, just about anything is sure to struggle with Vista 64 bit:D
 
Anything made by Intel will make your experience better. Then again, just about anything is sure to struggle with Vista 64 bit:D

You're probably joking, but I disagree with both of your points. A Pentium 4 (or any Netburst processor, or even single-core Core-based CPU) would most certainly make his experience worse, even though it's made by Intel. And I have no trouble with Vista 64 on my setup; you just need to feed it RAM. ;)
 
My laptop loves Vista x64. And its a laptop! (albeit with some damn nice specs)
 
I don't even think I can utilize a quad core 100% right now let alone a 6 core CPU. I just don't need that much power for what I usually run right now. Maybe in the future that will change.
 
I'm waiting for the 8 cores! That'd be an awesome upgrade for my rack servers.
 
Just a reminder because nobody seemed to have recognized this, but...
[size=+3]SOCKET 604[/size]

hex core desktop and laptop chips are a ways out, if ever (likely to go straight to 8 cores, whenever we do).
 
Would make a great workstation chip, but finding a good mobo will be hard (look at the mobo's for Tigerton). Also would probably be beast folding with the right setup.

 
Games just can't take the advantage of that many cores yet.

I think you can leave out the 'yet' in that statement aswell.
All major engines in the past few years have been written to take advantage of multicores, and nobody was really successful at it. Developers who've experimented with it, had also said that it wasn't much use, at a very early stage (John Carmack already experimented with dual CPU in Quake 3).
Nobody managed to find any good use for multicore processors in a game engine, and I doubt it will ever happen.

Ofcourse there are exceptions to the rule, such as SupCom, but that's mostly because it has an unusually heavy workload for things like AI, which happens to scale very nicely with multiple cores. You won't see anything like that in most games (like FPS, racing games and all that). Especially now that physics will also be offloaded to the GPU.
 
Well, who knows, maybe the raytracing idea will catch on and then CPU power will be useful for games. But maybe it won't. We'll have to wait and see.
 
Well, who knows, maybe the raytracing idea will catch on and then CPU power will be useful for games. But maybe it won't. We'll have to wait and see.

Probably not, because Intel has Larrabee for raytracing, and both AMD and nVidia have demonstrated raytracing on their GPUs aswell. So even if the future is raytracing, it will probably still happen on GPUs.
Aside from the fact that it will probably take quite a while to get the game industry to move from OGL/D3D-based engines to an all-new raytracing world. You can't shoehorn a raytracer into the OGL/D3D API, at least, not with any kind of efficiency at all. A new API is required, and game engines have to be completely redesigned.
 
Probably not, because Intel has Larrabee for raytracing, and both AMD and nVidia have demonstrated raytracing on their GPUs aswell. So even if the future is raytracing, it will probably still happen on GPUs.

Even if GPUs can do it, at least good multi-core CPUs will be able to do something.
 
Even if GPUs can do it, at least good multi-core CPUs will be able to do something.

You think?
We don't use multicore CPUs for software rendering now either, do we?
Well, it's possible, with SwiftShader for example, but it's a lot slower than even the slowest of Intel IGPs, so there's no point. You can't play actual games with it. Raytracing will only be even slower on the CPU.

I think it will be the same situation as today: GPUs taking care of the parallel stuff, and wondering what a game engine is to do with the cores on the CPU.
 
AI would be quite a nice use for all those cores, and not just for games like SupCom. Remember all Bethesda's promises about the AI that was going to be included in Oblivion, and how it actually turned out to not be noticeably better than Morrowind in that regard? Well, as there gets to be a lot more CPU horsepower to play around with, making cities full of people that *really do* lead their own lives could be seriously awesome, and significantly more feasible. Imagine rival gangs randomly facing off against each other, on their own, giving the protagonist the option of joining in or simply watching, and having it actually be unscripted. I see the proliferation of strong, multicore systems as an enabler of greater realism, more than anything else. Better physics is one thing, but there are so many *other* things that add immersion, which are logic based, instead of calculation based, which could greatly improve games.
 
The only real benefit I can see to a 6 core chip would be running VM-Ware. Concurrently running multiple virtual machines would definitely benefit from such a CPU, but not much else at the moment.....
 
I can't believe you [H] guys can't figure out how to make use of 6 cores! There are tons of ways....

1) VMware/Xen/KVM/Virtualbox/etc
2) Databases
3) Multimedia stuff (realtime streaming, transcoding, recompression, deinterlacing, etc)
4) Multi-tasking/threading OS
5) Network monitoring (E.g. Nagios)
6) Seti/Distributed computing
7) Fileserving Lustre/ZFS/GFS
8) Combination of the above.
9) Edit: Compiling...

Those are the ones I've though of in the last 30 seconds off the top of my head.
 
The only real benefit I can see to a 6 core chip would be running VM-Ware. Concurrently running multiple virtual machines would definitely benefit from such a CPU, but not much else at the moment.....

Funny, the server I just bought with two quad core Xeon's is specifically meant for that purpose...being VMWare partitioned in to smaller servers :p It's actually a really great use of the new multi-core hardware.
 
Well, the way it seems is that ordinary users will have no use for 6 cores. Like said earlier, the only real uses for that many cores are server applications and AI intensive games.

I supposed if you're a [H]ardcore multi-tasker, you could pull off full usage, but that would be something along the lines of running all the programs on your computer simultaneously:p

Speaking of AI intensive games, you guys should loo up a game call Dwarf Fort. Many hours of my life have gone to that game...
 
Even when you run 50 programs at once in reality they are mostly sleeping/waiting anyway, unless of course they're doing something like encoding.
 
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