We have already noted today that when developing the Sunny Cove microarchitecture, which will form the basis of 10nm Ice Lake and Lakefield processors, Israeli engineers were tasked with improving performance in single stream applications. “The Multicore Race, which Intel itself has been provoking for several years, has relied on the reasonable arguments of game developers that the importance of multithreaded performance is exaggerated by the company.
One of the main ideologists of Intel, Raja Koduri, spent his legal day off on Twitter not only on the story about the points of sale offering night delivery of fresh cookies, but also on the discussion about the need to create effective tools for analyzing factors affecting the performance of computers in games. Such tools, in his opinion, should help to determine which component is affected by further performance growth – the CPU or the graphics card, for example. It is also important to learn how to identify the reasons for the dropout of frames in games, and these analysis tools should be available not only to professionals, but also to ordinary users.
Koduri was unusually prolific and admitted that one of the game developers had already informed Intel about the current prioritization in this sphere. According to the developer, modern games don’t need more than four or eight processor cores, but an increase in single-threaded performance by at least one percent would have a much better impact on the performance of the entire system than a further increase in the number of cores above this limit. Interestingly, Ryan Shrout, the founder of PC Perspective, an Intel performance optimization specialist, joined the discussion. Most likely, a publicly available utility to conduct such an audit of game systems will eventually be developed.
