There’s no doubt that the technology have been moving forward fast lately. We have a (relative) problem though and that is that those who are pushing the development forward have switched from trying to execute an instruction as fast as possible to doing things in parallel. Both AMD and Intel have new quad-cores coming, but Intel has been offering Core 2 Extreme QX processors for six months now. The thing is that we don’t have that many applications that can actually use this kind of parallel power. Even if we know that Intel has launched SDK for parallel programming, we haven’t noticed any significant increase in applications for parallel capabilities.
The sad part is that there’s no real trend either, with one huge exception and that is the synthetic benchmarks, which in turn just leads to an even more skewed reality.
There’s power and there’s power. Intel realized that HyperThreading was a great way of working in parallel. Even if was really more about using unassigned resources than actual parallel work, Intel managed to trick the masses into believing it as parallel power in action. Although, HyperThreading did result in better multitasking.
When you look around today you can see how games are being patched for multithreading support, but most new games are still singlethreaded. The software is not keeping up and the future isn’t exactly superbright, but then again we should not paint you some sort of black doomsday picture here. We know that there are tons of programmers trying to adjust their applications to the new and multithreaded future and there’s no doubt where we’re heading.
The problem is that when the programmers have managed to catch up to where Intel, AMD and the rest is today, they’ve already moved on. We’re living in a world where the consumer should perhaps consider riding on the second wave, but without the fast progress of technology we would still be using processors that were close to overheating at normal use. Technology has to be one step ahead at all time to put some pressure on the programmers; that is what makes the applications grow.
Intel, AMD and the rest should keep working the same way they’ve always been, because things are just the way they should be.
