Boyd Multerer talking at GCU: Feeling the Heat: Gaming and the End of Moore’s Law
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On Wednesday 5th of July at 3pm, we have a speaker coming to Glasgow Caledonian University that may interest you.
Boyd Multerer was a key contributor to the Xbox platform team for over 15 years. During that time he founded Xbox Live, then ran engineering for it for 4 years. Then he founded and ran all of XNA and the Xbox developer program for 5 years. Finally, he ran software engineering for the Xbox One Console. (Kernel, drivers, OS and such. Everything that wasn’t a game.).
For the past two years, Boyd has been independently exploring parallel compute models, UI systems and more that he isn’t ready to talk about.
The way we write games (and all software) is in the midst of fundamental change driven by two external forces. The focus on chip design is now driven by primarily mobile devices (phones), who’s primary emphasis is on battery life and to a lesser extent servers in the cloud. Simultaneously, we have arrived at the end of Moore’s law.
Between the two, advances in gaming hardware will be following different paths than they have in the past, and we will need to shift our coding practices accordingly.
This talk explores the trends affecting us that have been building, makes predictions on what we will see and what will be important, and finally discusses ways we can make the best of the new world.
All software, and especially games, needs to be power aware and multi-core proficient. Excellence in these areas will a requirement going forward.
Register at the Eventbrite or contact david.farrell@gcu.ac.uk for info.
