In this video session, Intel graphics and game technologist Ron Fosner introduces the principles of designing game engines that scale to an arbitrary number of cores.

There are two main approaches, Fosner points out. "One is the traditional way of threading for speed; you parallize things to make them faster on the GPU. You want to break your game tasks up into chunks. The other way is programming and threading for features. You take advantage of all the extra CPU power that's beyond the minimal gameplay, and take it to the point where it's increasing the user experience. What you can do is continue to add content or work while you have CPU power available. You can increase the user experience as the CPU power increases, design your game engine to be multicore aware."

In part two of the session, Fosner delves more into practical techniques:

"Games are really very challenging to thread," he admits. "If you can manage to thread your game engine successfully, you can thread anything."