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PS4 won't use a Cell processor?

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Dela @ Mar 02, 2012 15:51 | 5 comments

Sources say Sony won't opt for a successor to the Cell chip powering its PS3 in its next generation home console.

Kotaku is citing industry sources in its report. It comes after Forbes reported chip-maker AMD would provide the graphics chip for the PlayStation 4 console, after turning to Nvidia for the PS3.

The Cell chip in the PS3 gained considerable media attention before the console's launch in 2006, with Sony suggesting that the chip would power multiple devices around the home, providing for shared computational power between them.

Not long after the PS3 was on the market however, there were reports of game developers finding the Cell tedious to develop titles with. Cell also failed to gain the kind of momentum and integration into consumer electronics that Sony had envisioned.

Already there is speculation mounting about what exactly will power the PS4. One suggestion is that AMD will provide for both CPU and GPU in the PS4 by way of AMD Fusion architecture, which could go over well with developers. id Software's John Carmack has already given a nod of approval to AMD Fusion-style architecture for the future.

Still, Sony has not even officially recognized the PS4 as under development, though it must be by now. Microsoft has reportedly been giving partners glimpses of the next generation of Xbox, code-named Durango, which suggests it will take a product to the market before Sony again.

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Comments

Comment by: neronut (Mar 02, 2012 19:07)

This is rather unfortunate news. They are dumping raw power. nVidia and Intel chipsets out perform almost all benchmarks when compared with AMD. The x86 platform is so archaic yet it still lives on...

ARM >> x86 for mobile platforms. ARM based chips are designed for mobile computing and thus have great power saving and other built in features. The cell processor is based on the PowerPC platform with extensions to allow for high speed floating point operations, making it a powerhouse.

Scott

Comment by: Mysttic (Mar 02, 2012 20:46)

Quote:
This is rather unfortunate news.

It isn't unfortunate if it means developers will have an easier time making cross platform games.

Comment by: xnonsuchx (Mar 02, 2012 22:32)

...and other sources say early dev kits already have a POWER7-based CPU and expanded SPUs.

Comment by: neronut (Mar 02, 2012 22:46)

Originally posted by Mysttic:

Quote:
This is rather unfortunate news.
It isn't unfortunate if it means developers will have an easier time making cross platform games.

Well, All other game platform, except the Vita and 3DS, use PowerPC based CPUs, using x86 will mean the code needs to support two different architectures. This is a huge overhead for the rendering engines. With the continued support of PowerPC, the rendering engines just need to be optimized for a newer architecture, which is a lot less work.

Scott

Comment by: Interestx (Mar 03, 2012 09:05)

I wondered here before if the next (the last?) gen of consoles would converge to the point of different brands doing much the same thing with minor differences in abilities (especially relating to the media hub stuff).

I can imagine the games industry would kill if it had to only make 1 game for all 3 (or 4) platforms (Xbox, PS4 & PC), with the differences between them being like running a game on a different spec PCs today.
Whether Wii U will stand out as the odd man out in this remains to be seen.....but even here the talk is of a very PC-like machine.

It makes sense.
Sony can have only looked on in horror as (despite all the appalling PR about reliability etc) Xbox 360 has gone on to clock up around 60 million sales to date.
That's a lot of software sales they have missed out on for their exclusive titles.
Similarly Microsoft must envy Sony's 55 million or so PS base and wonder how many millions more games they would have sold if a degree of cross-platform gaming existed.

I also suspect that neither of them in todays econmic climate want to sink record-breaking sums into the coming gen.

No doubt the move to a fixed standard res (1080p) on a growing number of many if not most owners TVs helps this standardisation enormously.

I am not at all surprised to hear Sony will use a very similar CPU/GPU.