Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? Its cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right?Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? Its great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.
