The key to remember is that the CELL architecture is highly scalable, which means that Sony can just double or triple up the number of SPEs, intergrate the RAM and multiply it by 4 or 8x, and drop the GPU completely, and you have a PS4. It'll save bundles on R&D and allow for a quicker achievement of profitability (perhaps even profit from the get-go)
With that in mind, Sony could just call the PS3 a loss and focus in the long run, but if the division continues to underperform financially ($337 million in the red this year), Sony may have some hard choices to make in the coming years, due to the economy and whatnot. Howard Stringer predicted a future Sony that is more focused on Software than hardware, which could spell doom for PlayStation as a console, but the brand could live on as something like Steam or N-Gage
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
