Intel man shows Guild Wars running on four cores

Author: Wil Harris
Published: 7th March 2006

Pat Gelsinger, Intel's man in the Enterprise field.

Pat Gelsinger, one of Intel's top tech honchos, showed today why Intel was staking its future on multi-core: more performance, less power. He called this approach the foundaton of 'Intel 3.0 - the next generation of Intel'.

Gelsinger engaged in a series of demonstrations designed to show how cool (literally) multi-cores are.

He showed off a quad-core processor running in a desktop system playing one of our favourite MMOs: Guild Wars. This, Gelsinger told us, was the first demonstration of a client-side quad-core system.

We also got the chance to see a quad-core server from Dell, which was able to absolutely rip through rendering tasks in Cinebench, which is a highly threaded application. With two processors each with four cores, eight threads made for a pretty fast rendering time.

He also invited Microsoft on-stage to showcase the new version of Microsoft Office. Applications like the new Excel include support for threading, meaning that a dual-core machine will race through complex mathmatical calculations far faster than a single-core machine. We saw a dual-core machine complete a graph render in 11.4 seconds, compared to a single-core machine finishing in 28.7s.

It seems that this year, far more software is going to be optimised for dual and multi-core. Could this finally be Intel's year? Or will AMD up the dual-core ante with processors that are even faster? Let us know what you think.