Shanghai (China) – Intel’s is showcasing the power of its upcoming processors with a new ‘Smoke’ demo which rains fiery destruction upon a virtual shack.  Slated to debut later this year, the multi-cored Hyperthreading Nehalem processors will be able to easily crunch through real-time particle physics like the one shown in the demo.

Update -  We didn't mention the processor specs in our original version of the article.  The rep told us it was a physical quad-core Nehalem running 2 threads per core (basically the new version of Hyperthreading).  So basically there are 4 physical threads and 4 virtual threads.  All of the Nehalem processors will have multithreading capability.

 

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Video of Intel's Smoke demonstration

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An Intel representative showed us the demo at the company’s Intel Developers Forum in Shanghai today.  The scene starts off quiet with a wooden shack, a small forest of trees, and several animals jumping and flying about.  But then meteors slam into the building and set everything on fire.  Of course the fire then spreads to the surrounding trees and within seconds the entire screen is aflame.

 

The rep told us that up to 60,000 particles are tracked and rendered in the demo and that nothing was “pre-baked”.  Running on a single thread, the scene visibly stuttered. Everything ran smoothly when all eight threads were enabled.

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