Maybe he was critizising multi-core because of his experience with coding SMP into Quake 3. I remember listening to an audio interview and he mentioned it improved performance, so I built my second dual cpu box.
But it was buggy as hell. I found out outline that this was quite common, so I ended up disabling the r_smp setting. Maybe it was a bitch for him to get working in the first place.
I always liked mulit-cpu machines, but it was because I liked multi-tasking in NT 4.
My buddy had a dual Pentium 120 (yeah, thats right Pentium(r) lol) running NT 4.0 Enterprise. It ran a dedicated server for Quake II in the background, while he logged into it in the foreground.
I used to have a Dual Pentium II 333 with a Matrox G200, then a Dual P!!! 450 OC'd to 558 with a GeForce 256. It was cool how much stuff you could do it once.
Still have the screenshot lol.
But in the end, it was fun to mess around with, but not overly useful to myself as a non-professional. Outside of servers, SMP still isn't fully utilized to its potential because it requires so much programming talent.
The other thing to keep in mind, John isn't trying to sell games at all. He's trying to sell engines to developers. Post Quake 1, he spent his career writing game engines in OpenGL in NT, then made one blockbuster to show it off. Millions of gamers drooled, developers went crazy to have these new engines to make their games, and the video card companies actually designed their cards from his direct input to make these games work. For a while almost every blockbuster was based a Quake engine.
His response shouldn't come as a shock given his history, skills and target market.
I have to admit though, I can see the argument where he is less relevant. He used to have the industry following him, and now they have drifted away. Like it or not, MS is winning the API war. And now John may have to follow a while. Unless he again comes up with something revolutionary, he may have to get used to seeing Source, Unreal 3, etc. being the dev's engine of choice.
EDIT:
As a geeky side note, I noticed when I built the rig in the screenshot that NT 4.0 had no less than 3 kernels for handling multiple CPUs. Tried all 3 on this box.
NT 4.0 Workstation Retail would alternate apps on CPUs. Task 1 goes CPU 1 Task 2 to CPU 2 and so on. This sucked btw lol. XP Home reminds me of this.
NT 4.0 Workstation OEM would load-balance, just like XP PRO.
NT 4.0 Enterprise had more of a SMP kernel. A spike in CPU 1, would result in a drop in CPU 2.
There was a very noticable difference in behaviour between each OS when multi-tasking. Enterprise quite strangly seemed to a better workstation OS than Workstation was lol.
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