Intel: Devs getting better at multicore

Speaking in a report on CNET, Intel’s director of gaming platform office Randy Stude said games companies are slowly increasing their handle on multi-threaded applications to run on PCs and consoles that pack in multiple processors.

"I’d say we’re at a ‘C-plus’ right now," he said. "When the first dual-core chips came out (in 2005), we were at a D-minus."

The multicore chips Intel and AMD have made for home PCs and IBM and Toshiba have made for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 respectively have famously demanded developers start multi-threaded programming. Tools companies, middleware technology and the chip makers and format-holder themselves have made some efforts to lighten the burden this presents – with some PC game makers releasing patches or optimising their games for at least dual-core systems from the off.

Intel says that developers will have to get used to the world of parallel programming, given that soon all home PCs available to consumers will come with a mutlicore processors as standard – and in time the tricky endeavour will become less problematic.

Said Stude: "The learning curve is becoming less and less to get threading work done."