The AMD/ATI merger- he has not formed a solid opinion. He believes that having two or three GPU makers is good, and is worried this may limit some choices. It will be good for AMD and ATI likely, but it may not be good for the industry, or the consumers, but it will be good for ATI and AMD in the long run.
Multicore/multithreading he does believe that there is more benefit to it than widening SIMD. He sees the end to the great CPU clock up, and that threading is the way to go. They have had success to using threading with graphics renderer, but can improve it. Sound is another good possibility. The process of multithreading is difficult, but there are benefits. But when you can only thread 20% of a game you do not get a huge increase in peformance. Multicore consoles and computers means the work must be done however.
Physics cards-id has no plans currently to implement physics card support. Carmack feels it will mostly be used for graphical gimmicks, and id has their own in house physics engine that they can use for whatever project they want. They feel physics cards could cause more problems in dev than they are worth, and that they will not change game play. With purely a graphics eye candy aspect they are not currently interested in the technology.
next gen title-the next gen id title will stray from their normal corridor shooter type. Improvements to megatextures will allow for huge outdoor battlefields, and it will also be able to be applied to indoor levels which it is not currently in ETQW. It should raise the graphical bar, and he seemed quite confidant that it will be a big hit. It may even have coop support if id has the time to put it in.
Cell-Carmack believes Cell is somewhat over hyped. It would not make a fast workstation CPU. He also believes that currently the cell power is 70% or more unused. He does believe Sony dodged a bullet by not using cell for the graphics.
