How much would it cost to throw a cell in PS4?

[Alby_da_Wolf]

GameAnalyser said:

Sal.Paradise said:

The viability all depends on how easy it will be to bring PSN games to PS4 without using integrated hardware.

Having to spend ~$40 for cell integration would pay off quickly if that meant the thousands of games already on PSN available for download to PS4 customers over its lifetime, and there was no other way to achieve this. As well as the extra consumers it would incentivise to upgrade to PS4 as it will play their PS3 games.

But if, say, ~80/90% of PSN's library can be ported over to PS4 either through PC versions, Gaikai streaming or software emulation, that ~$40 upfront hit seems like a less desirable route to take. 

Streaming or software emulation seems the ideal bet.

Agree, particularly if it's true they'll use an APU: the GPU core included in it could emulate SPEs using a SW layer much simpler than what a general purpose CPU would need to do the same job, and a lot more efficiently, while the parts of SW running on the PPE should be portable easily anyway, as PS3 used only one general purpose PPE core, so considering how much HW power increased in 7 years, even a simple and brute force emulation running on a modern mid-range multicore CPU should be able to reach the performances of the old native HW.
OTOH, HW BC would have been easy if Sony stuck to POWER architecture: in that case it would have just taken to add some SPEs to a normal multicore POWER 7+ CPU, possibly using the latest version developed by IBM, so that it could make sense to use them also as coprocessors for new SW (for physics engines, as DSPs, for graphics pre-processing, to run codecs, etc) and not only for BC.