In 2012, id’s John Carmack wasn’t terribly excited about what the next generation of consoles would offer. Even so, with the recent unveiling of the PS4, Carmack wasn’t shy about offering his assessment of Sony’s planned hardware.
I can’t speak freely about PS4, but now that some specs have been made public, I can say that Sony made wise engineering choices.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 21, 2013
“I can’t speak freely…” suggests id has a development kit (or at least has documentation and is under NDA), which isn’t unusual given the company’s position in the industry. id made its name on x86, so for Carmack, coding for the PS4 will be like putting on a pair of old boots… except those boots are extremely spacious and have little nitro-boosters on the sides.
Carmack also commented on multi-core, providing a much need dose of reality for those fixated on the PS4’s eight-core chip:
@kmanmx all apps are better with half the cores at twice the performance, the question gets more nuanced if the trade is at 1.5x perf
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 21, 2013
Much like the transition from single-core to dual-core and now dual-core to quad, the average game or application isn’t exactly thirsty for additional parallelism. If that’s the case, you’re better off with four, faster cores than eight slower ones.
As with the gamble Sony took with the PS3’s Cell processor, it’s clear the company is planning ahead — five years, at least — and if the performance trade-off for the added silicon is 25 per cent, rather than 50 per cent, then eight is indeed “wise”.
Carmack also responded to a question regarding the original PlayStation, providing us with this Twitter gem:
@hildgrim PS1 was the best design of its generation. Saturn was nuts, and N64’s push to SGI style pixels was technologically premature.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 21, 2013
(“SGI” refers to Silicon Graphics, the company responsible for the N64’s Reality chip.)
I’m sure PS1 and Saturn fanboys would be rejoicing… if they’d had this ammunition 15-20 years ago. I suppose you could always get the T-shirt…
T-shirt template: JohnRinkenberg/Vecteezy.com
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