The god has spoken

Carmack does hope that Sony avoids the Cell architecture all together due to the difficulty in development.

Fuck cell! For the Carmack's ために!

only certain tasks can be parallelized
This. I'd rather have more single-thread and memory parallelism in hardware so that e.g. the following sequence of instructions could be executed in one clock cycle:


mov eax, [esi+8*edi+12345678]
mov ebx, [esi+4*edi+23456780]
mov ecx, [esi+2*edi+34567894]
mov edx, [esi+edi+4567890C]

I believe stuff like that and optimization in hardware (like dead code elimination, so e.g. if you have "mov eax, ebx" followed by another "mov eax ..." the processor doesn't even attempt to execute the first instruction) is what will really boost performance, not THROW MORE CORES AT IT LOL