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John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS
Via a Gamasutra post, John Carmack's comments on upcoming id choices. Game|Life has a few quick comments on Carmack's hope to bring Orcs and Elves to the DS. This would be id's first game on a Nintendo platform in some time. Likewise, he makes it clear that he considers the 360 the dev platform of choice due to the ease of development on the console. From the article: "the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we're not going to do much until we're at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We'll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It's not something we're going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one."
"their tools are more based on Asian design and logic"?
What a bizarre concept. When I worked for a software company in Japan, the only way that culture intruded into software development (aside from an organizational structure that makes Dilbert's seem positively effective) was the fact that programmers who could used English manuals. Japanese manuals and other reference/instructional materials were so vague and information-poor that the language barrier was easier for my co-workers to overcome than reading materials in their native tongue!
I will grant you that Asians (East Asians, at least) seem much more comfortable with interfaces that we find incredibly cluttered. But that's not programming as such.
Not only is there the issue of 1 main core with 8 additional cores, the 8 additional cores don't have random access to main memory and are really only efficient at doing stream processing - they are tuned for vector operations. I'd agree that the GP(and GGGP) missed the point. The issue is not single core vs. multi-core - it's standard multi-core shared memory architecture vs. whack-ass-we-designed-it-ourselves-DSP-style-multi -core. Developers get the idea of multithreaded programming - it's hard, but they understand it. It gets much harder when you have to manually handle memory transfers for each of the threads to ensure they have the data they need to process.