The evolution of the multi-threaded processor design is the trend for next generation desktop processors. The introduction of Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology), where two logical processors simulate two physical processors and share the underlying hardware resources, is an indication that the processor is moving toward this multi-core model. This model will continue to evolve to support not only duplicated logical processors, but multiple physical processors in future generations.
Why should you thread your game? Parallelism is the easiest and most cost effective way to achieve scaling on multiple platforms. There are inherent performance benefits to threading a software application when the processor can support more than one thread. On a uniprocessor system, it is difficult to see the performance benefits of threading because the process or swapping threads in and out can be far too expensive. However, threading on a processor that support multiple threads, such as the ones that are currently available on the market today, offer benefits for threaded applications. By threading the code base it allows an application to take better advantage of under utilized hardware resources. Threading also introduces an application’s ability to scale on the next generation processors that have multiple cores, and can also support threaded applications. As the hardware evolves and continually improves so will the performance of threaded software.
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