Of course, we see a lot of melodrama on the internet. A finger cut quickly turns into a fatal aterial bleeding... Doom reports of course spread like wildfire, especially with wishful thinking involved...
Anyway:
"The cell processor has been a very successful part of the Playstation 3, able to munch through folding@home as well as the latest HD game demands. There have been many rumours around the net today that the followup to the CPU in the PS3 has been basically 'canned'. The story was that the new Cell Processor which featured two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs will not be released and that possibly the whole range was going to be discontinued.
We managed to get hold of an IBM spokesperson an hour ago and they said that only one CPU development cycle is being 'halted' which is the successor to the current PowerXCell-8i cpu. IBM have said they are planning to work on other CPU's in the Cell Processor 'family' and we would assume that by the time the Playstation 4 hits market that they could very well be involved on some level."
Read more: IBM have not stopped Cell processor development - DriverHeaven.net http://www.driverheaven.net/news.php?newsid=344#ixzz0Xhq6YCSF
To quote a buddy during all the doom and gloom reports (quite a Cell expert):
"Actually this is from a report form a German magazine which is rather different that the headline might suggest.
A never announced chip called the PowerXCell32iv has been cancelled. This isn't news, it's been known for months.
What was not announced is what they were doing with the technology, work was still continuing on Cell but no one knew what they were doing (other than the OpenCL compiler that was released recently).
Actually this confirms the architecture will continue, most likely in something like add-ons for BlueGene or big POWER boxes.
Of course what Sony (who use Cell) and Toshiba (who make them) have planned isn't mentioned."
