John Carmack: Gaming hardware beginning to reach "physical limits"

Speaking with Polish site CD-Action (via Digital Foundry), id Software's resident tech legend, John Carmack, gave his two cents on the purportedly far-off next generation of consoles.

"We talk about these absurd things like how many teraflops of processing and memory that are going into our game machines," Carmack said. "It's great and there's going to be at least another generation like that, although interestingly we are coasting towards some fundamental physical limits on things. We've already hit the megahertz wall and eventually there's going to be a power density wall from which you won't get more processing out there..."

He added, however, that the current generation of consoles suits him -- as well as many other developers -- just fine.

"As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."

Tons more through the link.