Waiting for Next Generation CPU Architecture

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 17, 2008

I was planning on building a new PC or two this Fall, but after spending as much money as I have, I’m going to not do that. Bills come first, then saving, then building new computers. I won’t have the money until I pay off my credit cards, then pay off my Federal taxes that I’ll eventually owe.

The good news is that I’ll be working on several projects, which might make some money from both ads and premium memberships. The bad news is that the projects won’t be finished until probably next year at the earliest. The even worse news is that the game projects probably won’t be making hardly any money at all for the first six months.

The cool news is that I’m going to have a lot of fun coding the projects and hopefully enter in some new paradigms along the way. They will be coded in PHP 5.3 and will be using WordPress as the core. The reason is that you can only recreate the user, registration, and administration wheel so many times before you start wasting your time doing so. If I’m going to get the games out the door as quickly as possible, I just need to focus on the game logic and design and forget about all of the extra stuff.

Back to the point. By the time I have the money, the next generation of CPU architecture will be available, and therefore I want to use that for my next few new machines. I’m looking forward to the GPU core on the CPU die and it will be interesting to see how many games develop for it. If it has the same opcodes as the Video cards, then it shouldn’t be too difficult. It will also be extremely fast.

I’ll be looking for a minimum of four cores, with one of them devoted to graphics. If that is out next year, then I’m going to build off of it. If not, then my gaming machine will have to wait another 6 months.

Possibly Related Posts:


Computers

2 Comments.

  1. mdmadph August 18, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    Unified GPU/CPU? Are you talking about AMD’s "Fusion" project? You might be waiting a big longer than 6 months for that, and I don’t think Intel is even trying for a unified GPU/CPU right now. Not to mention that any unified solution is going to be slow — "cheap" is what companies are shooting for in this situation, I’d say.

    But there’s no need to wait — if you’re needing a new gaming PC, get someone you know (who knows hardware) to price you a good, affordable (but fast) one right now — there’s never a need to wait. Something faster is _always_ right around the horizon, so there’s really no need to wait. :D

  2. Jacob Santos August 18, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    From how it read on Wikipedia, it sounded like they were working on Fusion for over 2 years now and would be the next generation CPU. If that is the case and it is easy enough to find out in 6 months, then well it wouldn’t matter anyway.

    My next two machines are going to be a file server and a media server (bunch of TV Tuners and lots of hard drive space). Those two machines don’t really need GPU core or Fusion. I will like to see the AM3 quad cores though. The current generation would suffice, but I won’t have the money for a while.

    I was unclear, I plan on upgrading my current machine that I use for development and mild game play. Who has time for playing games when you code 12 to 16 hours a day? Not me or at least not if I want to complete projects in a deadline. The CPU is kind of slow and could use 2.0+ CPU. Don’t really need quad or dual cores, but hey couldn’t hurt.