AMD has released its first dual-core Athlon 64 FX processor, the FX-60. The Reg puts it through its paces, and concludes: "AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 is the best consumer processor AMD has ever produced. With effectively a pair of FX-55s sat in the same socket, sharing an efficient memory controller, it's close enough to FX-57 in single-threaded apps that the multi-threaded advantage makes that slender gap moot. Targetted at the well-heeled enthusiast, the new dual-core processor should be a shoo-in for those with FX-57s already, and those with the required readies to drop on the latest and greatest."
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Member since:2005-07-06
How can you "require" dual cores? It's not like it's impossible to run multiple threads on the same CPU. Sure it won't be true concurrency, but it'll still operate.
Also, let's assume the game needs two threads to run in true concurrency. These threads will be able to run well on dual processor systems too.
Member since:2005-07-06
You can "require" dual cores because a single-core processor will not be able to provide sufficient performance at some point in the future. Even if you have a 3.0 GHz Athlon 64, and the game requires ~5.0 GHz of processing power (it will happen, not soon, but it will), no single-core CPU will be capable of it, thus in essence saying "you need dual cores".
Single-core performance has more or less peaked for the forseeable future. That's why there's such a push for dual cores and multithreading now.
As for dual-processor systems ... yeah, but dual-processor is a lot more expensive than dual-core. Consumers will all be on dual-core sooner or later.
Member since:
2005-07-06
You obviously have a weak understanding of processor performance. Multi-threaded applications = close to 2x the speed of the FX-57. Multi-threaded, dual-core optimized games (like UT 2007) = significant performance improvements.
Multi-threading/dual cores are the future. UT2007 is the first of many games that will show up to take advantage of dual cores, and eventually require dual cores,