I heard quad cores suck.
quad cores suffer from the same thing as multi-cpu machines from a bygone era. theyre most useful for number crunching. usually cases where the cpu spends more time doing math than talking to devices. such as when the computer is left alone to render something or to handle server tasks. they offer practically no advantage when controlling multiple devices on the system. sence games use multiple devices, sound, video, input, all being used pretty much at the same time, multiple cores just sit around waiting to be passed something to do.
theres a certain order the operations need to be done in, deviation will result in error. so the processor does as much as it can do. if your code wants to see if a*b > a+b, a*b would be done on one core, and a+b on another, but you cant do the > until you know the results, so only 2 cores get used and you got to wait for the next cycle to do >. its
more complicated than that. cpus can do more than a*b on a core at a time. cpu cores usually have multiple units for floating point, integer, logic and memory ops. in multicore setups you have a lot of units to fill in every cycle.
nowadays we have multiple threads, but programs need to be written bottom up with that in mind. you can allocate a core to physics, another to ghet graphics data ready fot the video card, another to handel sound and networking, and another to control the show. essentially your game would be 4 programms which communicate with eachother to get the job done. but as it stands, not many proggrammers are good at this. i think the lull in games coming out is due to all the programmers having to relearn their jobs for the newer multicore technology thats in everything theese days.
