Nintendo + Intel will be the killer next generation combo.

[alephnull]

Squilliam said:

Joelcool7 said:

Nintendo's a loyal company they will likely stick with IBM. Not to mention backwards compatability issues. Its better to stick with PowerPC!

PowerPC is likely out because I believe Nintendo will want to have a combined CPU+GPU on the same die. It means a great savings in power, heat, packaging size and board complexity. It only really leaves AMD and Intel as viable options.

If the machine was designed for realtime ray-tracing it wouldn't necessarily need a GPU. Furthermore, the papers I've read involving the RPU (a different ray-tracing chip) seem to conclude that the kind of architecture you would want to pair with ray-tracing hardware is a so-called "broadband" architecture (high memory bandwidth).