Sony Moving Away from Cell-based PS4

[Soleron]

Firstly, while Goto is a good journalist, he doesn't usually have secret industry sources. He goes on very good guesswork and public domain information.

There are only four real choices of CPU for a performance-oriented PS3.

- Intel
- AMD
- IBM (Standard POWER)
- IBM (Cell)

Any other CPU vendor does not have the performance to compete. I'm thinking of ARM and VIA here primarily. Those three companies also have the strongest CPU manufacturing capability; choosing another company would mean negotiating with one of them for fab space anyway, because independent foundries like TSMC or UMC are too low-power oriented to do powerful CPUs in a reasonable time and budget.

So, the top two have the advantage of being x86 and hence easy sharing with the PC platform and easy to develop for as most developers understand x86 multi-core. The Cell would also be easy to program now, but since they would have to make architectural changes like the cache it would mean another learning curve, which a third-place entrant into next generation cannot afford to impose. And standard POWER would mean easy sharing with Xbox 360, though I believe MS will pick an x86 CPU this time around since it's their native platform and they only went away from it because Intel's architecture in 2004-5 when they were designing wasn't good enough.

The advantage of AMD (though for political reasons I think it's the least likely option) is that you get a great-performing GPU and CPU on one die from one foundry. That will bring down dev costs and manufacturing costs considerably; all previous Playstations trend towards greater integration like that. Although Intel can too, their GPU isn't good enough and the integration is on the package level rather than the die.

There are only two choices of GPU, now that Intel's Larrabee has been delayed over and over and indications are that its first iteration was hot and underperforming. Not something to risk a console on; at least AMD's Fusion uses a known CPU and known GPU, just new process and die layout.

- AMD
- Nvidia

Sony's choice of Nvidia was wrong this gen; the PS3 GPU is inferior to the AMD one. Nvidia's roadmap is also not strong, with the GT200 having been delayed 7 months and Fermi being similarly delayed and not out - and with a huge TDP of 225W it doesn't sound like derivative parts will be as low power consumption as is required for consoles. So I would say AMD is the most likely option. There's also the chance of a deal with AMD for both CPU and GPU too.