Dual core in single-thread games

[Krusty]

Got a question for ya... The lowest Conroe is 1.8GHz. What if you played a FPS game or something that's not coded for multi-threading? Is it going to run really crappy because the chip is 1.8GHz? Or is that 1.8GHz performing like a P4 3.0GHz because it's got different architecture?

How's that going to work? Because I've been eyeballing the low-end conroe cores (daydreaming mind you) but then I thought "1.8GHz? Hell I've got 2.66GHz now!". So outside of Windows and inside the games I'm most likely going to play, would that give me the shaft or would it end up playing even smoother despite the lower GHz?

[Skuzzy]

Waaaaayyyy different architecture.  It's all about t-states (the number of clock cycles the CPU uses to execute any given instruction).  It has always been about t-states.

Conroe uses far fewer t-states to execute any given (well, almost any) instruction so it does not need to run higher clock speeds.

[Spatula]

Almost all software these days is multithreaded.

Also dont forget that while the clock speed of a single core may be slower than the core of the single core chip you got now, it doesnt necessarily mean it will perform slower. Clock speed doesnt alwaysn equal Performance! In real performance terms i would suspect a single slower clocked core from a modern multi-core machine could out perform older single-core designs with a higher clock speed. And dont forget its not just the core, its all the cool new technology you will get with a new Mobo: faster bus speeds, faster and bigger and faster caches, newer chip designs etc etc etc - which have a huge impact on true performance. Not to mention upgradability going forward.

But if your constantly only using half of the available cores, theres still room for improvement, obviously.

[Skuzzy]

Spatula, unhhh...most software is still singl-threaded.  Almost all is multi-task capable, but very little is actually multi-threaded.

Most multi-threaded software is along the lones of video editing, audio editing, high end render farm packages.  But there is no real reason for most applications to be multi-threaded.

[Spatula]

I should have said most modern games would be. Something has to be doing the AI. As thats where orig post was going.

[Skuzzy]

Games are difficult to multi-thread due to the synchronous nature of them.  The asynchronous events in a game certainly could be multi-threaded, but anything requiring interaction with the user could not be multi-threaded.

In some ways, games are multi-threaded by default.  If the game makes use of low-level network code, it will be threaded, by default, as Windows runs it on a thread.  Sound, via DirectSound, is threaded as well (sort of).  Most games have to monitor sounds being played so they can terminate/modify/restart the sounds when needed.

The above is what most games use to claim they are multi-threaded.  They really do not start and mamange thier own threads.  Aces High II does start and manage threads.

[Krusty]

Ah, thanks Spatula, Skuzzmeister. I wasn't entirely sure. I didn't know if Conroe was just a P4 that was re-wired to run on less juice, of if it was "a step up" so to speak.

So even the 1.8GHz Conroe would totally own my current processor, then, in games like Half-Life2 and FEAR, right?

[Skuzzy]

Correct.

[Mini D]

The conroe is based on the same architecture that the Centrino (m-class) processeros were designed with. Actually, all of the new processors that Intel is releasing will be based on the same architecture (except the Itanium). I'm told (through corperate brainwashing) that this is the first time Intel has done this.

The Centrino was the first "platform" that Intel designed for laptops. It was designed around low power performance.

I honestly can't believe we made the change. It's the first truly smart thing Intel has done in 10 years.