Forget Santa Rosa, how about a quad-core Penryn?
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 17th 2007 7:46AM
posted Apr 17th 2007 7:46AM
Honestly, we don't exactly know how to take the news that Intel's already looking beyond next month's Santa Rosa release to a reported quad-core Penryn mobile processor. On one hand, our eyes relish the opportunity to play the latest titles at the highest resolutions whilst bragging aimlessly to our online pals, but then again, we don't look forward to the presumed third-degree burns that could likely develop from tossing these in such tight quarters. Nevertheless, Intel managed to drop a few more details in regard to its mobile CPU plans, and noted that Santa Rosa's successor would likely be based on the 45-nanometer Penryn design and offer high-end gaming notebooks a ridiculous amount of power. Additionally, an Intel exec showcased the future chip's ability to be user-overclocked, suggesting that it would be "your responsibility to take care of cooling." Of course, if Intel could buddy up with IBM's miracle-working cooling solutions, the forthcoming chip could manage to breathe a bit easier, but we've got until "the first half of 2008" to see about all that.
I've been gaming on a dual cpu system since the BP6 and dual celeron 400's and I can say that quad core will do jack all for gaming until the game writers start writing multithreaded (that hasn't happened yet, the first game that can use more than one core at a time will be BIG news). My second cpu is 90% or more idle while gaming, unless I happen to be encoding a dvd or something at the same time :)
quad core does NOT help gaming rigs. dual core is useful though, and provides more than enough spare CPU. The money is better spent on a faster CPU, or better video card, or faster ram.
Uh...I guess you haven't heard of Supreme Commander, one of the first games to support dual-cores. It also does use quad-cores, and has a nice performace increase with them, but from the benchmarks I saw the problem wasn't even the game. It was mainly the OS (WinXP and Vista) of which neither of them seem to know how to use a quad-core to its full potential.
There are several upcoming titles that, to my knowledge, are supposed to have the ability to take advantage of multiple cores. Multiple cores are also the staple of the PS3 and 360. I think the near-future will hold some good things for those of us with dual or quadcore CPU's.
Just wait for half life 2 episode 2. Along with that coming out the source engine is being rewritten to scale to any number of cores. So that should mean that any games that use it will also support multi core also. I'm sure some tweaks and optimizations will still need to be done to them but otherwise it will be very handy. Not to mention partial physics will be introduced meaning things like rain will interact with each other and smoke will hit the ceiling and not just go straight though but roll up to a hole or what not. Multi core cpu's will start to be very handy for games soon enough.
Liquid helium cooled laptops. Do it.