What software now and in the next year will actually take advantage of quad cores?

[cchen]

What software currently (and to be released) will actually use more than two cores?

 

[Nothinman]

Most software won't even use 2 cores so 4 will be even more rare. Right now some niche software like 3D renderers, audio encoders, server daemons, etc are designed to be multithreaded but that's about it. As they get more popular I'm sure more games will be multithreaded but right now there's only a few.

 

[EagleKeeper]

The OS will be able to use multiple cores depending on the design of drivers.

For games; once the data is outputed for display, the OS can have the output driver use a different core than the game driver.

However, this could also impact that quality of play in that some data information could be calculated before the user has had a chance to see the results of the previous actions.

 

[Nothinman]

"game driver"?

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
"game driver"?

Game core..
Main logic application path..
etc.

 

[EagleKeeper]

As discussed in other threads here and elsewhere; the design of the application must be planed/modified to allow concurrent execution of processing.

There are problems with deadlocks and synchronization when doing items in parallel.

As long as the application generates threads; the OS will distribute them across cores.
The application used to be able to (under Windows NT) be able to assign processing to a given core. this would allow taking advantage of cached information within the CPU vs having to miss and reload from other memory

 

[mechBgon]

Video-editing software comes to mind.

 

[Nothinman]

Game core..
Main logic application path..
etc.

Which isn't a driver at all.

 

[tdawg]

AutoGK (for video conversion/encoding) seems to utilize 4 cores pretty decently. I think DVD Decrypter spreads its work over all 4 cores as well.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Game core..
Main logic application path..
etc.

Which isn't a driver at all.

True - my use of driver was nto indented to indicate the hardware interface code.

Poor choice of words on my part.