Carmack has spoken out about the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft. He is quite dubious about all this multi-core stuff that both Sony and Microsoft are touting for their respective consoles. He think that they will be very hard to develop for, and thinks that maybe “we might have been better off this generation having an out-of-order main processor, rather than splitting it all up into these multi-processor systems.”

On the PS3, he has this to say:

There’s sort of this inclination to believe that — and there’s some truth to it and Sony takes this position — “ok it’s going to be difficult, maybe it’s going to suck to do this, but the really good game developers, they’re just going to suck it up and make it work”. And there is some truth to that, there will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time, and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches and CELL is worse than others in some respects here.

On the Xbox 360:

…the intention is I’m probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on [Xbox 360] as a primary development platform, where I’ll be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then we’ll go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform.

Link: Next-Gen - Carmack Explores Next Gen Challenges
Link: C&VG - CARMACK ATTACKS NEXT-GEN SUPER STATUS