id's Carmack: iPhone nearly as powerful as Xbox, PS2

[NJ5]

@ssj12: I've never seen Carmack hate on multi-core processors. Here is what he said at QuakeCon 2005:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8665

Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable. Carmack cited his Quake III Arena engine, whose renderer was multithreaded and achieved up to 40% performance increases on multiprocessor systems, as a good example of where games would have to go. (Q3A's SMP mode was notoriously crash-prone and fragile, working only with certain graphics driver revisions and the like.) Initial returns on multithreading, he projected, will be disappointing.

Part of the problem with multithreading, argued Carmack, is knowing how to use the power of additional CPU cores to enhance the game experience. A.I., can be effective when very simple, as some of the first Doom logic was. It was less than a page of code, but players ascribed complex behaviors and motivations to the bad guys. However, more complex A.I. seems hard to improve to the point where it really changes the game. More physics detail, meanwhile, threatens to make games too fragile as interactions in the game world become more complex.

Seems to me like he's just saying that multithreading would take time to take off... he was right.

He also expressed a lot of skepticism about physics acceleration cards, and once again he was right. It seems that his doubts about new technology are often correct.