There's no shortage of skepticism surrounding the practicality of massively multi-cored, or even quad-core, microprocessors lately. Following announcements by companies like Tilera, which is now shipping a commercial 64-core chip, the rest of the world has been trying to figure out what precisely it will do with these multi-cored monsters?
Enter Jerry Bautista, Director of Intel's Microprocessor Research Laboratory. Bautista took to the company's research blog yesterday andtried to outline some of the ways multi-core chips (and terascale computing) are (or at least will be) useful.
In his attempt to answer the question: what does one do with 80 simple floating point cores, Bautista pulls out many of Intel's standard responses. There's the oft-used multimedia based apps , which he says could involve resolution enhancement, natural language and contextual searches, as well as "automatic" video highlight extraction. Eventually though, Bautista does get around to conjuring up some intriguing specifics in domain of gaming and movie-based physics.
"Hollywood has completely embraced the utilization of realistic digital effects, Bautista says in the post. "Imagine such realism occurring in real time in a game or even a movie that is not heavily scripted, but rather adapts and accepts changes you suggest midstream. You don’t like the direction the plot is taking -- change it!" Choose your own adventure-style movies? Now we're talking.
Bautista also highlights physical modeling in games as a potential application for multi-core processors. "Certainly a physically realistic game could consume every compute resource available, providing enjoyment to those of us finished with chores or a hard day of work," he says. "There is almost a visceral draw to those games where momentum is conserved in collisions, smoke is generated not just by an opaque, fuzzy 'ball' but rather a simulated flame with temperature gradients and the resultant, seemingly random buoyancy effects and smoke eddies that makes watching a fire a pleasurable experience."
This increased realism has potential applications not only in traditional video games but also in virtual worlds like Second Life. Indeed, if there was ever a world in need of a graphical makeover, SL would be on the top of the list. In fact, Intel's CTO, Justin Rattner, plans to feature some visual effects in his "virtual worlds" keynote at the Intel Developer Forum next Thursday, according to Bautista. It all comes down to the fact that physics is a truly general purpose application and can achieve better performance on array of CPUs than on a GPU, according to Bautista.
