Simon’s Blog

Wow! I’m speechless! The recent problems with Xbox 360 demo pods are nothing compared to this. According to The Inquirer, all of the first crop of games for the Xbox 360 are single-threaded. That is truly shocking, and spectacularly bad news for the console, whose launch is just a few weeks away.

The whole point of the next generation consoles is that much of their power comes from the fact that they can process multiple threads simultaneously. It can’t have escaped developers that writing apps that run in a single thread isn’t the way to go… which means they must be finding it really difficult to write multi-threaded code.

So, why is it such bad news? Well, it means that it’s unlikely that the launch titles for Xbox 360 will be much of an advance over the previous generation of consoles. Which means there’s not much point in anyone buying an Xbox 360.

Now, concurrent programming is one of the more intellectually demanding aspects of modern software development. High quality, multi-threaded programming is beyond the capability of most programmers; and difficult and error-prone for even the brightest and best. The games developers are really going to have to find a way round this. Fast.

Update 7 Nov:

It seems, in fact, that the intial reports on The Inquirer weren’t quite right. See the follow-up story.