Carmack offers his next-gen wishlist
id tech guru lays out his demands.
id Software co-founder and all-round tech mage John Carmack has detailed what he wants to see from the next round of console hardware.
Jargon buster at the ready? Good, then we shall proceed.
"One of the most important things I would say is a unified virtual 64-bit address space, across both the GPU and the CPU. Not a partition space, like the PS3," he told Tom's Guide.
"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.
"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," he continued.
"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."
A shiny brass penny for the first one to translate all that into mortal-speak.
Carmack added that he was "very interested" to see whether platform holders decide to stick with optical media or attempt to forge ahead without it.
"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. But this generation, I know most executives were surprised at what the attach rate was on this current generation of consoles."
For more high level crystal ball-gazing from the big man, give Eurogamer's own recent Carmack interview a read.