Keely: First I want to ask you about the console war. You know, you're a guy who everyone always looks to for the inside scoop on you know, PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360. Now we're seeing some PS3 games here and a lot of people are saying they're not seeing a big difference between them and the Xbox 360. Do you think the PS3 will be more powerful than 360? Or, is that [the games] just what it is?
Carmack: Well, this situation is not something that has a nice simple answer like that because the truth is that the PS3 has more peak performance and that's what Sony was looking for with the decisions they made; cell architecture, and to a lesser degree the video chip decision. It gives it [PS3] more theoretical power. But what's going to matter is what you wind up delivering on the games. And I do think Sony made a less than optimal decision than Microsoft from the perspective of the game developers.
Microsoft chose to have symmetrical CPU's, have less of them, but you can program them all the same way.
Keely: Sony has this weird Cell architecture which there has been a lot of press about, but I hear its hard to program for..
Carmack: It's asymmetric. Where you have 1 processor with dual threads that are symetric on there -- where you do most of your work. But anything you want to spin off to the cells you have to break up into these small nuggets of work. For that you have to use a different compiler, different tool chain for..
Keely: So, bottom line, do you think it was a mistake?
Carmack: I do. I think the reasoning that saves them is that they have the dominant market position over Microsoft, and they can look at this and say -- developers are essentially forced to sweat blood to take advantage of Cell because its the dominant platform and they will win to some degree with that. There will be some developers that pour their heart and soul into this -- and make game development twice as difficult as it should be. Sony is hoping that having a higher peak performance and having some developers that will sweat bullets over this -- they may get better games out of it.
We're looking at it [PS3]. We're not a first party or second party on it. So we're looking at this across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The great part is, none of these consoles stink -- none of these platforms are bad. As in previous generations you would look at this and say -- this really is painful.
Keely: What about the Wii, the graphics there....but that's not what it's about?
Carmack: Yeah, they're a little bit behind, we're not on board with the Nintendo side of things. 作者: 国产宝宝 时间: 2006-8-25 17:14
He definitely is a one of gratest marketer rather than a coder on the planet. 作者: 网上的final 时间: 2006-8-25 17:48
