no, just two

When quad cores represent a sizeable fraction of user-end computers, pretty much the same way dual cores have only just become standard for gaming. (If you can call it "standard" when all to many games don't support them in any real manner)

So, the information indicated in the recommended settings is redundant:

System Requirements:
Recommended - 2.2 GHz Dual- or Quad-Core Processor, 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Windows Vista), 256 MB DirectX 9 3D Video Card (Radeon X1600 / GeForce 7600 and above)

If it doesn't make a difference, the "2.2 GHz Dual" reference should be enough...

That can be found at the "STORE".

EDIT: Anyway, for something more meaningful, SINS is a game that's being advertised as limited only to the kind of hardware a player has. It would seem reasonable for the game to be not only scalable to the kind of display card one has (such as in the excellent GalCiv series) but also scalable in the number of processors one has (beyond dual-core).

Although at its first steps, Quad-core processors and up are the way of the future. SINS, due to the sheer scale of playability, would be a perfect candidate for the implementation of this kind of scalability, looking well beyond into the future.

But, of course, technological breakthroughs are costly and one can only hope...

Intel tried that approach with the Itanium and lost a LOT of money.

I'd would love to see the CEO say that at the share holders meeting   followed by group hug and some doughnuts   

BTW, as far as the game's requirements reading "dual core" I think thats an attempt to help people understand that a 3GHz P4 is not going to cut it, even though a 2GHz Core2Duo will. People don't understand that architecture is even more important than clockspeed when it comes to gauging performance.

The trouble with true multi-threaded applications would be that they probably wouldn't run at all on a single core machine.

Which is something makers of software will have to keep in mind for a long time to come.

A few facts you should be aware of, then.

1) Intel is, in fact, working on a new architecture - what they call the "Teraflops research chip", where the lowest-level product will have 80 cores. (Probably 64, with 16 disabled to increase yield, but meh. It goes up from there.) This is not an x86-compatible cpu, although *this* time they're going to bundle an x86 emulator. See intel.com for details.

Anyway, the individual cores will be much slower than current x86 cores, although this is somewhat made up for by being able to use higher clock frequencies. You probably won't want to run it at full speed all the time, though - power usage is roughly proportional to the square of the clock frequency.

2) AMD is, instead, working on a new architecture with a low-count multicore x86 CPU in the center, surrounded by dedicated hardware such as physics chips, GPUs, etc. etc. - business as usual, basically. I really prefer Intel's approach.

3) Ad-hoc thread-level parallelism, such as.. pretty much every game that uses parallelism at all uses, is not the future. The future is in automatically dividing tasks at a *much* finer granularity, giving you enough fractions to feed 80 cores, 320 cores, any number of cores the user wants to throw at it. Ideally the (potential) number of divisions will be proportional to the amount of work that has to be done, so you can always handle a double-size simulation by doubling the number of cores. This is actually unusually simple for games, because they have a time axis; it shouldn't be too hard to design the code so the game state at time T is only dependent on its state at time T-1 (or T-n for n>0. The point is not to have state at T depend on /other/ state at T.) Then the order of the operations doesn't matter, so you can in principle do all of them in parallel.

This is made much easier by using fully functional languages such as Haskell. Sure, there's a performance cost (less of one as the compiler is improved; about 50% increase in cost now, if you're lucky), but who cares if you can use four times as many cores and take less time to write the game in the first place?


I hope you enjoyed this introduction to CS 3201.
Any questions?

It is insufficiently european.

What do you mean by clocking back? A Q6600 has the same clockspeed as an E6600. A QX6850 is the same speed as as an E6850, and so on. There is no "clocking back". Furthermore, max overclocks of Core2 duos and quads of the same stock speed are virtually identical. Pardon the expression, but you are totally talking out of your ass here.



There is more to the computing world than gaming, and many applications will happily use all the cores you can throw at them, even with my poor old clocked-back Q6600 @ 3.7ghz.

Exactly. Let's postulate 2 gaming enthusiasts, one with a duo and one with a quad, both heavily OC'd to around 4ghz. Let's say widespread support for quadcore in games doesn't show up for another 2 years.

Now let's further suppose that 2 years from now two (of today's)cores at 4ghz is getting to be a bit on the slow side. The guy with the duo will be forced to upgrade. The guy with the quad will effectively have already upgraded due to the games now taking advantage of all of his cores, and can put his upgrade money elsewhere.

Quad cores will significantly improve your performance when using software such as Adobe Photoshop or InDesign, but will not improve gameplay or general system performance much.

Put your money on a good dual core, like Intel's Q6600, and it'll last a good long while.

A $50 air cooler will OC a quad about as far as it can reasonably go. You need to spend a ton on watercooling to get a meaningful improvement. And tdp of the Q6600 is 95W now, the old B3s were 105.

Even in apps that dont' fully support quadcores, you get a bit of a performance increase clock-for-clock over a duo because you've got twice the cache and aren't giving up any cpu cycles to the OS and background processes. The Q6600s OC so well that they'll come within a hair of OC'd duos with much higher stock clocks that aren't much cheaper, so bang-for-your-buck is definitely there, and this should get even better when the Q9450 hits the shelves.

Still, I agree that for people who are only gamers, a quad is probably overkill right now. But once you render on a quad, or play an Immense GalCiv 2 game while encoding a dvd or doing a 3d render in the background, you'll be hooked.