I talked with Boggs about what's coming from AMD. His answer only emphasizes the need to start parallelization now. "So currently we've got the QuadFX platform, originally codenamed the 4x4. This platform, in my opinion, is the best game development platform. The reason: It's got two sockets and a total of four cores today. And the platform will be upgradeable to an 8-core system. So game developers, especially the engine guys, the core tech guys who are working on threading, are going to want to test how well their engine scales.

"Today they can do it on the 4-core system, which is our QuadFX platform -- two sockets, two dual-core processors, which is how we get to four cores. Later this year, when we introduce our quad-core processors [codenamed Barcelona] take out those two dual-cores, put in two quad-cores and now you have an 8-core system. So to me, there is no other system that I know of that will be 4-core to 8-core upgradeable."

Robert Anderberg, Technical Lead at Realtime Worlds in Dundee, Scotland, uses the latest, highly multithreaded, Unreal engine for their new MMO, APB. He mentioned the work of Herb Sutter, C++ legend, saying, "This will be a fundamental shift in how games are written, and will rely on [what Sutter calls] latent concurrency, which allows an application to scale well to a large number of cores."

He says, "Multi-core is the present and future of PCs and all other games platforms, even mobiles soon. Once chips move beyond a number of cores that are easily utilized by taking large functional pieces of your game and dedicating a core to them, the whole architecture of games, and indeed support from programming languages, will be forced to change."

Justin Whitney consults and develops for leading high-tech firms and writes about emerging technologies. He can be reached through his site at http://www.justinwhitney.com/.