Daily Techno-Babble

Better late than never, a long awaited update distributed this past Tuesday to users of the insanely popular online game World of Warcraft finally enabled a feature that shows off what the latest multi-core processors can really do. Up until the latest patch (2.0.1) the graphics libraries used by the game were singled-threaded, meaning they were unable to process more than one basic function at a time, even on systems with more than a single core. Through the use of multithreaded openGL they have finally enabled the ability for the game to process a significantly greater volume of data resulting in a major increase in speed (and framerates) for the game.

So why is this important? Simple, this technology demonstrates how multi-core enabled applications are going to be the norm sooner rather than later. Performance on today’s computing platforms only benefits slightly from increases in clock speeds due to the inability of manufacturers to produce fast processors which don’t melt everything they touch! It’s a basic tradeoff, you can go for high mhz (with high heat) or low mhz (but with many processor cores). Unfortunately much of today’s software is simply not designed for multiple core (or processor) systems. In the past these machines were mostly limited to server environments where large database applications could be custom tailored to make use of multiple processors (or cores) for large scale business applications. But thanks to cheap dual-core (and higher) processors everyone can now make use of this technology.

This new update to World of Warcraft heralds a new chapter in both application and game design, one where the mhz of your processor does not matter, how many cores you have does.

UPDATE: Here are the official patch notes and the details on the Apple OpenGL changes for the multi-threading.