X-bit labs

Intel Developer Forum Spring 2005: Day 2 Coverage (page 12)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 03/02/2005 | 11:53 PM ]

Applications and the Operating Systems

According to Intel, Microsoft is going to license Windows for dual and multi core systems on the per socket basis. No matter home many cores or threads are there: there is going to be only one copy of the XP Home for that processor. The story is similar for Linux, it is also going to be licensing on a per socket basis.

In terms of support by the applications we can say that any application that supports HT will also support multi core.

If the application is not written for multi core it will still run fine, but you will not be able to take advantage of the performance capabilities.

All the major OS are ready for multi core applications. Intel claims that there is lot of software out there already and there is more to be announced.

At Intel booth called Multi-Core Zone they were demonstrating a game based on Unreal 3 gaming engine which was running on a system equipped with dual core 3.2GHz Pentium Extreme Edition processor supporting 8 threads.

Game based on Unreal 3 engine running on new multi-core CPU

Also I got the opportunity to see side by side comparison of the performance demonstrated by two systems: the first one was built with multi-core Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 3.2GHz and Intel 955 chipset (left), while the second one was built with a single core Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.7GHz and Intel 925 chipset (right).

In both games I saw, which were running on dual core hardware the graphics quality was very fine and smooth, and the physics models were very realistic. Well, the visual test was highly positive, but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about the performance of the new dual and multi core solutions in the new games until we get a chance to really investigate the performance advantages in our labs.