Game designers are slowly warming up to the idea of multithreaded games, but many other processing-intensive applications, such as video and photo editors, compression software, and encryption software, are already multithreaded. When these programs find a second processor, they break their tasks down into multiple threads and Windows then dispatches them to the processors. Before dual-core processors, dual-processor boards with two separate CPU chips showed significant performance benefits over single-chip machines. But putting two processors on one piece of silicon is better for speed, cache coherency, memory management, and other issues.

If two cores are better for multiple tasks and threads, four cores are better still. AMD has announced some details of its forthcoming quad-core processors, including economy of power consumption and heat, some internal 128-bit data paths, a shared L3 cache with individual L1 and L2 caches, and more. Intel has demonstrated the potential power of quad-cores by lashing up two Core 2 Duos into a single package. It's a fake quad-core because they're separate chips and their caches aren't integrated, but it's a convincing fake all the same. The real quad-cores will be even faster.

Remember that the dual-core chips from both Intel and AMD already execute 32-bit and 64-bit code natively, and that Vista will ship with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on the DVD. So not only are you looking at doubling, then quadrupling the number of cores, but also doubling the instruction width for the operating system and many applications that will quickly follow the 64-bit path.

The first quad-core chips will go where they can do the most good: servers, computer clusters, scientific workstations, and video editing systems. But they'll come down to ordinary desktops, even notebooks, by 2008 or 2009. They will be enormously capable, although we'll do our best to saturate them with an unending deluge of processes, services, and increasingly complex applications.

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