Raapys said:
I don't think your approach to SEV multi-threaded would work. You could have one core per AI, but that doesn't help you any because the AIs do their turns one after the other, with their decisions being made depending on the previous AI's actions that turn.
You could at least in theory make AI processing multicore by splitting out the "opponent invariant" parts (aspects that don't depend on the current tactical actions of other players like research, diplomacy, production and movement in systems held by that AI exclusively) and each individual combat could be handled by a separate thread (with the main AI thread moving on to other systems pending battle completion).
Whether SEV could do this though, depends solely on the underlying code and so is a question only Aaron could likely answer.
As for more general purposes, there are plenty of situations where a second core comes into play even for single-core applications (e.g. Nvidia's graphics drivers with some of the image quality options will use it) and for on-line gaming you'd benefit from having another core for security software (firewalls, anti-virus scanners, etc) so with a dual-core application, you're already talking about quad offering real benefits. And Intel's budget quad-core Q6600 may offer "only" a 2.4GHz clock but there are plenty of reports about the G0 stepping overclocking to 3.0Ghz+ with air cooling alone.
Finally, it seems that even eight cores can be made use of by some games - for example
Lost Planet.
Re: OT: Building a new computer...
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