John Carmack’s next-gen console wish list
Simon Williams August 23, 2011 - 10:22 amJohn Carmack has revealed what he wants to see hardware-wise in the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
John Carmack, id Software‘s resident technical genius, has been talking about what would constitute his “wish list” of hardware features for the next generation of home consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
“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,” Carmack said. “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,” he continued. “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 [Sony and Microsoft] 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,” Carmack mused to Tom’s Guide. “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.”
Carmack’s first game for this generation of consoles (and PC as well), RAGE, will see release on the 7th October. While you wait, check out our hands-on preview of RAGE.
