In a recent interview at Quakecon 2011 with Tomsguide.com, John Carmack went on record as requesting several things from Microsoft’s and Sony’s newest console releases.
“So one of the most important things I would say is a unified virtual 64-bit address space, across both the GPU and the CPU. Not a partition space, like the PS3. Also, a full 64-bit space with virtualization on the hardware units – that would be a large improvement. There aren’t any twitchy graphics features that I really want; we want lots of bandwidth, and lots of cores. There’s going to be a heterogeneous environment here, and it’s pretty obvious at this point that we will have some form of CPU cores and GPU cores. We were thinking that it might be like a pure play Intel Larabee or something along that line, which would be interesting, but it seems clear at this point that we will have a combination of general purpose cores and GPU-oriented cores, which are getting flexible enough that you can do most of the things that you would do on a CPU. But there are still plenty of things that are much better done with a traditional CPU core, debugger and development environment. I will be a little surprised if there’s any radical departure from that. I hope neither of them mess that up in some fundamental way. I’m very interested to see what the next gen consoles look like, if they’re even going to have optical media or if they try to strike out without it. Those are the types of big decisions that I wouldn’t want to be in the position of making because they’re billion dollar effects. But this generation, I know most executives were surprised at what the attach rate was on this current generation of consoles.”
John, I love your work and I’ve been a fan of yours for years, but it seems like even though you mentioned you would use the PC as your lead system, it seems that you are trying to get all the systems on even ground. I don’t know how that’s going to fly with the wallets of console gamers may not want to open that wide for what your asking for. Still if that were to happen it would be good for everyone.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
Source – Tomsguide (Tomshardware)