EPIC MULTITASKING

Back it with enough RAM, and your multicore processor can significantly increase the number of applications you can get useful work out of at the same time. The rule of 2GB per core has held well for several years, but is starting to break down as apps, especially games, demand more RAM.

Multitasking is a great way to exploit a multicore processor, as it sidesteps the need for your apps to be written with multithreading in mind. Each app will have its own threads, which can be doled out by the CPU’s scheduler and spread across the cores.

So, if you want to run an imageediting app while streaming 4K video, and decompressing a huge zip file, you can, but how many of us really work that way? What’s more likely is setting an enormous background

task going, something like generating thousands of smart previews in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, then opening another app to get something done, rather than looking at progress bars while that big task is completing.

In 2016, Intel decided the word “multitasking” wasn’t good enough for what its Broadwell-E decacore CPUs could do, so invented the word “megatasking” to describe their app-switching abilities. Call it what you want, this is one of those things, like opening every app in your Start menu and seeing how long it takes, that you can do to show off, and highend desktop processors make showing off easy. How useful it is in the real world, however, is another question, as people tend to focus on one thing at a time.

With enough cores, you can open as many apps as your RAM can handle.

We hope Rage’s sequel will lead the way in games’ exploitation of multiple cores.