Following up on the recent Smoke framework overview, here are two videos from the Intel Software Network featuring Intel's Orion Granatir, Brad Werth, and Omar Rodriguez demonstrating the Smoke framework demo application, and explaining some of the concepts behind the project.

The demo was run on an Intel Core I7 with all four cores, as well as four virtual threads with hyperthreading. "There's lots of ways you can do threading," said Granatir. "It's a difficult problem." He noted:

"The Smoke demo is a technical demo we put together at Intel to showcase threading in a game environment. We wanted a lot of thread interaction between a lot of common game systems, and show you could thread these in an effective manner. ...The demo has two purposes: it shows off this threading, and it shows off how you can harness the power of Intel's modern CPUs."

Speaking on the project, Werth explained:

"In development, we ran [this demo] under two different threading system. We built what we call the native thread pool system using the Windows native APIs, then we built a threading system using the same API for the Intel Threading Building Blocks, which is an open-source library that was originally produced at Intel, but we were so happy with it we opened it up to the open source community."

In a second video, Rodriguez shows off the demo in more depth, characterizing it as a "multi-threaded demo with multiple game systems interacting in a highly-threaded environment." It allows the user to toggle between the number of available threads, and measures total CPU utilization, frames per second, available threads, and a list of systems interacting, including physics, audio, AI, animation, scripting, graphics, and others.

Posted by Chris Remo at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an overview piece posted on Gamasutra, Intel Software and Services Group application engineer Orion Granatir and PC Perspective editor-in-chief Ryan Shrout have outlined Intel's Smoke framework, which attempts to intelligently optimize multi-threaded processors for gaming, ameliorating some of the difficulties encountered by game developers who are unaccustomed to the increasingly important world of multicore development, which is "moving in the direction of 'more cores' rather than 'more clocks.'"

In addition to explaining the purpose and architecture of Smoke, the piece gives a practical example based on a demo application, showing relative performance based on scaling to various numbers of cores.

As the pair explains:

"Smoke is a model framework that maximizes the performance of the processor in a purely gaming environment. Built to take advantage of all available threads, it works equally efficiently on standard dual-core Intel Celeron processors as well as on new Intel Core i7 Processors with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.

"The Smoke video demonstration, shown at many trade shows and technology events, uses modern game-development technologies, including Havok for physics processing, FMOD for audio playback, Ogre 3D and DirectX 9 for graphics rendering, and more. As you would expect for an internally developed demo, the code shows the Smoke framework as a well-partitioned and configurable product.

"Intel developed Smoke mainly as a teaching tool to demonstrate the ability to create a framework that can scale to any number of threads. Developers are encouraged to explore the technology by examining new threading techniques and learning about the interactions between various game engine systems that typically hold back a game’s potential threadability.

"Intel’s goal through this and other efforts is to help prove that multi-threaded gaming can be done effectively and is an investment in time that is worth taking."

The full article is available to read on Gamasutra; no registration is required.

Posted by Chris Remo at 04:26 PM | Permalink