Franny's Adobe

Il blog di Francesco Carucci
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Intervista a John Carmack: console next-gen e multiprocessing

L'intervista e' a questo link:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200701/N07.0109.1737.15034.htm?Page=1

Un passo interessante e' il seguente:

None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. [...]
I do sweat about the fragility of what we do with the large-scale software stuff with multiple programmers developing on things, and adding multi-core development makes it much scarier and much worse in that regard.

Il discorso generale riguarda la scelta di passare a CPU multi-core (simmetriche o asimmettriche poco importa) e quindi l'enfasi sulla programmazione multiprocessing e multithreaded, che, secondo Carmack, non aiuta gli sviluppatori: molto piu' facile programmare un processore single-core molto veloce.

Questa posizione e' inattaccabile, e' vero che la programmazione single-threaded e' piu' semplice della programmazione multi-threaded, ma questa e' la mia opinione a riguardo (scritta in inglese perche' proviene da un'altra parte):

I don't really agree with John's attitude towards next-gen consoles in general and multiprocessing. To me his argument seems very close to "Unstable requirements are scary and risky, we want stable requirements". This is true in an ideal world, where we want stable requirements and very fast single-core CPUs. But in the real world of next-gen consoles and game programming we have unstable requirements, mult-core CPUs, and deadlines: the alternative is not having next-gen consoles or not making games.
I think the solution is for the industry to evolve its methodologies to tame the complexity required by games nowadays and reduce the cost of writing software, better tools, better organisation. It's more a mentality shift, in my opinion, rather than a technical problem.

Print | posted on giovedì 11 gennaio 2007 17:15 | Filed Under [ Programming ]

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