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Squilliam on 28 December 2009
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Soleron said:
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)


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.

I disagree with a few of your assessments. I deleted some text to make it easier to read.

The problem with using an X86 architecture is the fact that the chips themselves give much higher margins as desktop/server parts. What incentive does even AMD have to sell them X86 chips for the typical $50-60 range when they can get twice that selling essentially the same chip to OEM computer manufacturers? If they sell them a cheap chip then the performance may not be higher than what they have at present. With AMD vs Microsoft negotiations, Microsoft can sweeten the deal by implementing AMD specific extensions in Windows and raise the potential selling price of all AMD chips whereas Sony does not have the same negotiating position. 

Also if they do move towards a more GPU compute orientated architecture then some derivative of Fermi would be their best bet as Nvidia has the best compute orientated architecture in the GPU business on both the hardware and software development arenas. It would also further complicate their ability to get backwards compatibility for their PS3 games and complicate things even further (see Microsoft for Xbox 1 BC).

 



Tease.