Gamers Have All the Fun (and Horsepower)

By Doug Barney

In the PC business, two groups get the good stuff first – consumers and hard-core engineers, designers, animators, and videographers.

The first PCs with CD-ROMs, sound, and good graphics went to home users, and only later moved to corporations. On the high-end, workstations from Sun, Apollo, SGI, IBM, and others set the standard for super high-res graphics and number-crunching capabilities.

This is still the case, and I must say it’s a good thing.

The latest happenings are on the gaming side. Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, CA, just announced “Skulltrail”, an 8-core platform that also ties into GPUs from ATI or NVIDIA. That’s some serious juice.

While some game developers are geniuses at multithreading and writing to GPUs, the rest of the software market has a long way to go to catch up. For most apps, these extra cores are less busy than Paris Hilton’s Latin tutor.

Meanwhile NVIDIA has a brand new GPU, the GeForce 9, with 64 stream processors. The Geforce is aimed at gamers, but NVIDIA clearly learns lessons from the enthusiast side that it applies to engineering and general purpose computing.  

Intel

NVIDIA