This year, Valve is talking to us about what is possibly its most difficult iteration of the Source engine yet - adding multi-thread support to make the most of the new dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming from Intel and AMD. The timing of the day is to coincide with the release of Intel's Kentsfield quad-core chip, which is released today.
We had an hour-long presentation from Valve staff, then asked questions of the team, including Gabe Newell, for a further hour. We discussed the transition to multicore in depth, and we have come away with a slick understanding of Valve's implementation, as well as a couple of benchmarks that we can use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. This is an exciting one, so sit down and prepare for some multi-threaded crowbar action.
Before EP2 as well? That surprised me. I was reading that and thinking 'Oooh, that'll be really shiny when it's ready in a couple of years'.
I'd better start saving for a quad-core then.
