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> By 2009, game developers will face... CPU’s with: 20+ cores It seems like he was off by a matter of a few months at most. I have a quad AMD Opteron(tm) Proc

> By 2009, game developers will face... CPU’s with: 20+ cores It seems like he was off by a matter of a few months at most. I have a quad AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6172 (Mar 2010) 2U server with 48 hardware cores. This motherboard can also take the 16 core CPU's which were also introduced the following year, which would put it at 64 cores and 128 threads. The Opteron 6 core CPU's were introduced in June 2009, so a quad server would be 24 cores, or 48 threads. Of course, that's not cores in a single CPU, if that's what even what the prediction was referring to, but that probably wouldn't matter very much from a gaming dev perspective anyway. It was probably a pretty good guess, all things considered.

Hendrikto 5y ago
> a quad server would be 24 cores That‘s not usually what people game on, though. Even today, 20 core CPUs are the exception for gaming rigs.
- throwawayapples 5y ago
  Point taken, but it is for server-side games like Fortnite, because the bulk of the game world actually runs on the server. However, I'm not sure when they started shifting over to that model (or even if that's what he was talking about as the future).
- chii 5y ago
  16 core machines isn't that uncommon today, but i guess back in 2009, it was way less common. But i think the trend is clear - more cores is the future as clock speed has slowed down.
  - suyjuris 5y ago
    > 16 core machines isn't that uncommon today ~0.31% according to the Steam hardware survey [1] If you are including 8-core machines with simultaneous multithreading (so 16 logical cores, 8 physical), then you would be at ~17%, however. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/
dagmx 5y ago
I suspect, when he says game developers will face 20 core CPUs, he means as a target baseline system, not as an exception.

Hendrikto 5y ago

> a quad server would be 24 cores That‘s not usually what people game on, though. Even today, 20 core CPUs are the exception for gaming rigs.

throwawayapples 5y ago
Point taken, but it is for server-side games like Fortnite, because the bulk of the game world actually runs on the server. However, I'm not sure when they started shifting over to that model (or even if that's what he was talking about as the future).
chii 5y ago
16 core machines isn't that uncommon today, but i guess back in 2009, it was way less common. But i think the trend is clear - more cores is the future as clock speed has slowed down.
- suyjuris 5y ago
  > 16 core machines isn't that uncommon today ~0.31% according to the Steam hardware survey [1] If you are including 8-core machines with simultaneous multithreading (so 16 logical cores, 8 physical), then you would be at ~17%, however. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

dagmx 5y ago

I suspect, when he says game developers will face 20 core CPUs, he means as a target baseline system, not as an exception.