Digital Home Thoughts: In Defence of Multi-Core

"This week has been all about multi-core. We were hit by one big announcement that we knew was coming - Intel's Core 2 Quad chip, codenamed Kentsfield. This has been on the books for a while, and we've been playing with the chip since the beginning of October - and having a lot of fun. This announcement was preceded by the news, which we reported on in the early hour of Thursday morning, of Valve's move to multi-core for the Source engine. We weren't quite sure what to expect when we rocked up in Bellevue to see the legendary software developer, but when we'd finished the meeting, it was clear that Valve's team is wholly committed to a multi-core future and is beginning to work towards that vision now."

I was surprised, much like the author, that people were skeptical about the usefulness of quad core. Honestly, if I could, I would be right there with the folks from Iceland and Finland that liquid cool and overclock their processor. :) Anyways, on a more serious note, I have been running Windows Vista and Office 2007 for a few months now and I can totally tell the difference in performance when running it on a single core with hyperthreading vs. a dual core box (most other stats being equal), where the dual core machine runs much better. Most media based calculations are already being offloaded onto the GPU in any case just to free up the CPU from overload but with applications getting to be beefier (compression, antivirus, firewalls, just to name a few) I can absolutely see the need for quad-core.