I've been monitoring how many developers are watching all of the segments of the video series we've posted on the Take Five site.   It is natural that not everyone will make it to the end, but I'm wondering if there is anything we could do better.

First, I'd like to know if any of these are the causes:
  A) Didn't know series were there
  B) Watched the video from a different page w/out the series navigation
  C) Didn't have time to watch them all
  D) The video, well, just wasn't that interesting
  E) My boss walked by, and I had to quickly switch screens from videos
  F)  Other:  ______________ 

Take a look at two of the series we've posted from the Game Developers Conference:  Optimizing DirectX for Mulicore, or the SkullTrail series with GRIN Software* and UbiSoft*.  Or the very long Confronting ManyCore series.   Once a video is playing in the player at the top of the site, there is a link that says "see Next in series" and/or "see Previous in series" to easily (at least I thought) move from one to the next. 

While you in the player, you can rate the videos, get the embed code and direct links, leave comments, and/or link back to the blogs.

To see more series, they are in "series boxes" on the tabs below the Take Five player.  If you mouse over the numer, you will get a video description. Be sure to click on the blue arrow to see the Virtualization and Community, and coming soon, Open Source tabs. 

I'd love to hear your comments, and answers to the mulitple choice above.  I'm hoping I don't get too many D's.

Happy Friday!

It's so cool to have this interest becoming more mainstream - I can actually talk with people who play the games I play and I don't get weird looks like I'm from Mars.  Well, of course sometimes I still do - but that's because I'm a geek and not just because I play PC games.

Gamers are always so interesting to speak with since most of them build their own machines with the best & fastest components to ensure they have the ultimate gaming experience.  I have several rigs that I've built myself - my main one has an Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor (QX6700) and the performance just blows me away (and I'm not just saying that because I work at Intel!).  

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how far this industry would come -- I still remember my first gaming PC (an Atari 800XL) where I played David's Midnight Magic late into the night!

Gamers - and game developers - shouldn't miss some of the cool things that Intel is offering right now for game fanatics!:

• For starters we have our "$1,000,000 Intel Make Something Unreal" contest where you can submit your mods for Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3).  I am a total noob to UT3, but one of these weekends I will try my hand at some example mods and post here in my blog for everyone to laugh at. 
• Along the same lines, we also have an Intel Crysis Mapping contest with some cool PC component prizes (Intel® processors & motherboards) and a chance to win a trip to the Crytek headquarters.
• For aspiring game developers, check out our Intel Game Demo Contest -- your game could be the next big hit that I stay up waaay too late playing!
• Just need a fix on the latest gaming news?  Make sure you check out our new Intel Game On portal.
• And finally, our in-person gaming events in the second half of this year will be loads of fun.  I hope you'll make plans to join us at SIGGRAPH and GDC Austin to say hello!

Well I'm happy to now tell you that this morning when looked for the board on Amazon.com, it is reported as being In Stock and available to ship!!!

May the force, powered by eight cores, be with you ...

If, like me, you are a virtualization junkie then I would definately consider this board for your next Workstation. If you are a serious gamer, then it goes without saying ... you want this board!!!

For those of you still wondering what I'm talking about, I'll let you in on a little secret. We're showing the old design to about half of you, and the new design to the other half. Yes, this is intentional. We're collecting metrics to guage the effectiveness of the new design.

Would you like to do me a favor? Let me know what you think about it.  Does it work better than the old design?  How would you improve it?

COLLADA, Tools and Intel Graphics:
Luxology MODO 302, Softimage XSI, or see http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/videos/home.aspx

Someone needs to do something similar for virtual worlds applications (as they emerge).

So what's this thing about "C-states, C-states and even more C-states"? It turns out that there are different kinds of C-states depending upon what part of your system you are talking about. There are core C-states, processor C-states, and OS C-states. All are similar and are idle states (I'm excluding C0, of course.) They are also different in some substantial ways.

A core C-state is a hardware C-state. There are several core idle states, e.g. CC1 and CC3. As we know, a modern state of the art processor has multiple cores, such as the recently released Core Duo T5000/T7000 mobile processors, known as Penryn in some circles. What we used to think of as a CPU / processor, actually has multiple general purpose CPUs in side of it. The Intel Core Duo has 2 cores in the processor chip. The Intel Core-2 Quad has 4 such cores per processor chip. Each of these cores has its own idle state. This makes sense as one core might be idle while another is hard at work on a thread. So a core C-state is the idle state of one of those cores.

A processor C-state is related to a core C-state. At some point, cores share resources, e.g. the L2 cache or the clock generators. When one idle core, say core 0, is ready to enter CC3 but the other, say core 1, is still in C0, we don't what the fact that core 0 is ready to descend into CC3 to prevent core 1 from executing because we just happened to shut down the clock generators. Thus we have the processor / package C-state, or PC-state. The processor can only enter a PC-state, say PC3, if both cores are ready to enter that CC-state, e.g both cores are ready to step into CC3. I'll talk more about this in a subsequent section.

A logical C-state: The last C-state is the OS's view of the processors' C-states. In Windows, a processor's C-state is pretty much equivalent to a core C-state. In fact, the OS's lower level power management software determines when and if a given core enters a given CC-state using the MWAIT instruction. There is one important difference. When an application, such as Intel's PowerInformer, thinks it's interrogating a processor core CC-state, what is returned is the C-state of what is called a "logical core". (A logical core is technically not the same as a physical core. In my experience, a logical core is almost always the same as a physical core, but it doesn't have to be.) Logical cores don't have to worry about little things such as the hardware the OS is running on. For example, the C-state of a logical core doesn't worry about the barriers imposed by shared resources, such as the clock generators, I talked about earlier. Logical Core 0 can be in C3 while Logical Core 1 is in C0.

This seems a little confusing doesn't it? So how do logical core C-states, core C-states and processor C-states relate to each other? Take the situation above: From the OS perspective, logical core 0 is in C3 and logical core 1 is in C0. Since C3, from the hardware perspective, actually shuts down a shared process, the clock generators, (physical) core 0 must be held at CC2 since core 1 is in C0 and using the clock generators. The processor, in a global sense, is not idle since core 1 is in C0, so the processor's C-state is C0. To use a little bit of that intimidating mathematics,

Processor C-state = Min(core C-states)

Core C-state = Minimum barrier(set of all logical C-states)

Logical C-state = anything the OS wants

Next: There has got to be a catch

On Game Developement Tools, SDKs, etc:  The COLLADA tools demo station was one of the busiest in the Intel booth.  We had to jump in to film Peter de Lappe giving a demo of Softimage's XSI, and Immanuel Martin showing Luxology's MODO 302.  You'll hear real developers -- as many were asking questions while we were filming.

Be sure to check out Alexis Khouri: Allegorithmics Real Time Graphics Texture Streaming for Games.  The graphics in their demo are based on the cathedral across the street from the Allegorithmic office in central France.

Ethan Schur, Director of Marketing at TDVision - had a very popular 3D stereoscopic viewer in the Intel lounge for developers to play an auto racing game.  His video shows TDVision's SDK for adding 3D Vision to your games.  

Lee Bamber, CEO of Game Creators, talked about how this is a cushy time for developers - and that you must start thinking about the N-Core Revolution -- developing for many cores -- or be obsolete.  In his second video, Optimizing for Multicore, Lee talks about how his company was able to make a much better product by taking advantage of parallelism.  Both are on my top video list.  

We also had Gary Carleton, Intel Applications Engineer give an overview of Intel Performance & Threading Tools for Game Developers, and a demo of the Thread Profiler and Threading Building Blocks.  

That's more than enough for one blog, so I'll stop here to save more for my next entry. 

In the meantime - what do you think about these videos and the new Take Five site?  What topics would you like to see in video format on ISN?