November 08, 2005
By the end of 2006, all three of the next-generation game consoles should be on the market. But with Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony all going with more complex hardware for their upcoming consoles, how easy will it be to develop for three very particular platforms? More complex hardware means longer development times and more time-consuming ports.
The next generation of consoles presents developers with entirely new programming challenges, the most significant of which is the move from single-core to multicore CPU design.
A single task with two threads that each demand 100% of a CPU's time should also be able to run them both, one on each core, in half the time as a single CPU at the same speed.
In practice, however, things are invariably much less straightforward. Most games today are still written to use a single thread, because it is the simplest programming model and because most hardware (both PCs and consoles) contain only a single CPU core. All programmers are very familiar with writing single-threaded code, but few are experts at multithreading.
Ars Technica takes a look at the architectures of the next-generation console and what they mean for developing new titles. Will next-gen titles be able to take full advantage of the new hardware, or will they be written for the least common denominator?
