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AMD raised eyebrows when rumors strongly suggested the chipmaker will announce a new lineup of CPUs featuring an unconventional trio of cores, occupying the middle ground between the increasingly mainstream duo core and high-end quad core CPU markets. Jokes flew over a borked batch of quad core CPUs which AMD nevertheless needed to sell somehow. In fact triple core CPUs are not unheard of outside of the desktop CPU market; the Xbox 360 for example features a triple-core processor. PCGH Extreme quizzes id Software's Jan Paul van Waveren over what triple-core, consumer desktop CPUs like AMD's Phenom could bring for game developers.
Van Waveren reminds us that programming on multiple cores typically means identifying and executing different tasks on different cores, the key being that they run in parallel in similiar amounts of time. This is referred to as "task parallelism". "Pipelines" are split into multiple steps where each will be run on a separate core. This is often exploited for duo- and quad-core processing.
However, van Waveren believes the gaming workload should be distributed differently with triple cores. Instead of running different tasks in parallel, triple-core threading could perform the same task in parallel on different data, or "data parallelism":
Quote:
To scale well on systems with an arbitrary number of cores it is more effective to exploit data parallelism. In this case each core performs the same task but on different pieces of distributed data. For instance, instead of running the AI in a separate thread, each AI character can run in a separate thread. Each thread performs the same task, in that it advances the state of one AI, but each thread works on a different AI character. Another example would be texture decompression, where multiple threads could be used to decompress subsections of an image, as opposed to having one thread decompress a whole image.
In the end, developers should make game engines flexible enough to accommodate for a variety of game platforms including PC and console, instead of focusing on how to take advantage of a specific number of cores. To do this, engines should be designed to be able best exploit task or data parallelism, enabling performance to better scale on the CPU architecture behind the game platforms as required.
Quote:
Current high profile game engines are designed for multiple platforms, including the PC, Mac, XBox 360 and PS3. As such the engine is not specifically designed for a fixed number of cores. Instead the engine is setup to have enough separate tasks, or exploit enough data parallelism such that it scales well on all platforms. From a programming perspective the ideal number of cores is one single super fast core. However, with a definite trend to a growing number of cores on today's CPUs there is no easy way around it, and more programming time will have to be spent to take advantage of all the cores.
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