Sponsored Feature: 'Who Moved the Goal Posts? The Rapidly Changing World of CPUs'

Author: by Staff

Our newest sponsored feature, part of Intel's Visual Computing site, examines the processor architecture and design shift of recent years that has complicated once-simple rules regarding CPUs and computer chips. Developing for a continually, aggressively-evolving platform can be a challenge, write authors Ryan Shrout and Leigh Davies -- while developers are busy writing game code for current hardware, processor performance and PC feature sets continue their rapid evolution. Shrout and Davies offer an overview of how and why this occurs: "Until as recently as 2005 the main processor advances were targeted at improving single threaded performance with each generation offering higher operating frequencies and better instruction level parallelism. Developers assumed that as newer processors were released they would "just be faster," and the code and applications would scale accordingly, frequently code was designed with the assumption the top end PC at the time of release would be faster than the development system the original code was written on. However, a shift in processor architecture and design over the last few years has changed this one-time rule into a much more complicated scenario. With the introduction of the Intel Core i7 processor game developers can now up to eight times the number of computing threads that were once available. Processor speed and features are no longer increasing in simply a linear fashion and new technologies such as turbo boost can have a significant impact on the system's performance, making it critical that the code written for any application be able to not only scale from processor generation to generation but also reliably adapt to future architectures down the road." The feature explores how developers can effectively use the computing power at their disposal while processors get ever stronger and faster. One recommendation is to get up to speed on multithreading: "To get the best performance benefit from the Intel Core i7 processor developers need to aggressively implement multithreading. Game engines that have been written for four or fewer threads will utilize only a fraction of the available processing power and may see only limited performance gains over previous quad-core processors. Developers have to go beyond functional parallelism and merely separating the physics or AI and instead move to data-level parallelism with individual functions distributed across multiple threads. One of the key requirements of any graphically intensive game will be ensuring the rendering engine itself scales across multiple threads and the graphic pipeline between the game and video card doesn't become the bottleneck limiting the use of both the processor and graphics processing unit (GPU). Hopefully the support for multi-threaded rendering contexts in DirectX 11 will significantly benefit this area of games programming." The in-depth seven-page sponsored feature is now available to read on Gamasutra.