kidjan's Journal: Why dual cores are going to rock domes.

Although there is plenty of enthusiasm over dual cores, I also get the sense that many people don't see them as being very useful.

While I can certainly see where they're coming from, I think it's much more productive to see examples of software that can make use of dual cores this very instant. A few examples perhaps beyond what people may be envisioning:

1. MP3/WMV/AAC/whatever encoding rates can be effectively doubled, whether working on a single track or multiple tracks. Multiple tracks is easy, because you just have two encoding threads leapfrogging one another. On a single track, it'd be a bit more involved, but basically a file could be broken into two prior to encoding. Either that, or they could both pull from the same buffer and leapfrog audio samples (or chunks).

2. Video re-encoding. Imagine being able to both VIEW and ENCODE a DVD all at once. One cpu is devoted to playback of the audio and video, and the other CPU is devoted to ripping and re-encoding.

3. The application I'm currently working on is video surveillance (more on this in a future article when I'm not under NDA). Not only can I easily eat all the CPU Intel and AMD are currently throwing at me, but I can potentially eat it for years to come when re-encoding content for the Internet, local area devices, and so forth. Audio and video applications are an almost endless souce of dual core perks, in my opinion.

4. Once games have been properly threaded, I think increases of anywhere fom 30-45% can be expected. Additionally, one could do other things in the background while playing a game.

There are some HUGE advantages to having extra parallel cycles on an end user's computer from a developer standpoint. I think it's going to usher in new eras of audio/video capabilities, and also enable user's computers to be more like "servers" and offer them things over the Internet that they never would have dreamed possible before.