Dual Core, Single Performance

There's an interesting history behind dual core processors. Intel and AMD are introducing dual-core architectures for a reason: all other means of growing the processor performance have already been exhausted. The clock frequencies cannot be increased that easily any more, and the higher bus frequency as well as larger cache size do not provide the expected efficient result. So ingeniously, they (Intel and AMD) decided to integrate two processors in a single chip, and thus theoretically obtain double the performance. Just for kicks, Sun was the first one to introduce a dual core processor called UltraSPARC4+. But, that has nothing to do with my column.

It has been a year, since dual core processors were introduced. Initially released for servers, they also moved on to desktops. But, are they efficient for desktops? Well, sadly the answer is NO, at least for now. The biggest target audience for dual core processors have been gamers, but I have hardly seen much performance advantage over single core processors. Though there were special patches released for support of dual core processors in certain games such as Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, the performance has not increased significantly. The AMD Athlon FX 60 has a dual core architecture with each core running at 2.6 GHz. That is near 5.2 GHz of pure performance. Some enthusiasts, have taken the AMD Athlon FX 57, which has a single core and using liquid nitrogen, they have touched speeds of 3.6GHz+ from the default speed of 2.8 GHz. On benchmarking the over clocked processor, it had a huge lead over the Athlon FX 60. I do understand that the increased hyper transport speed also plays an important role, but a 3.6 GHz single core processors beating a dual core 2.6 Ghz processors by a huge margin itself shows, that the dual core are either not efficient or still needs the software to be optimized for the dual core.

I think, the second case is the answer. I am still hoping some more optimization in the games will help give dual core an advantage over single core. There's one more thing I would like to add here, about the AGEIA announcing the "PhysX" physics processor. I have seen the demos and was very much impressed by the potential of this new technology. But, it has its own price. Do I really need to buy a physics card?

This again got me thinking, that when we have dual core processors and soon the quad core processors launching by 2007 Q1, do we even need such technology (separate physics card)? Given the current failure by the different companies to utilize the full potential of dual core processors, a separate physics processor makes sense. But shouldn't the CPU be doing all these things by default rather than offloading the work to these add-on cards?

All said and done, it is high time the software developers pull up their socks and deliver applications that utilize the full power of these CPUs so that the users get the Dual advantage.