AMD GPUs for better performance and lower energy consumption and more environmentally friendly than the energy inefficient Nvidia GPUs.
AMD GPUs over the last few years have out performed and become more energy efficient than Nvidias GPUs. Nvidia days of being the market leader in GPUs are over. AMD is the new king of GPUs. 

Google went that route as apps have to be as hardware agnostic as possible as there is a wide veriaty of hardware that it has to run on, running in a virtual machine helps make apps more portable and less prone to conflicts. But they will always incur a performance penalty vs native even the best virtual machines today have a 4-6% CPU performance penalty under ideal situations and in the real world it can be up to a 40% penalty so there is no way consoles will use them unless they literally have performance to burn, or developers for whatever reason need their console games to run on diverse hardware which means you lose the advantage of optomising for a single hardware set and running it direct to metal or at least to very low level APIs (which doesn't require hand optomised code BTW console manufacturers supply specialized compilers).

Oh and high performance apps on Android like games actually run native (or at least parts of them that require high performance) as the virtual machine is far to slow.

Here is a benchmark of Dalvik vs native on android 

The slow performance of certain elements of the JVM are more of an issue with the implementation of the JVM than they are with the approach compiling to an intermediate byte code. As you are aware the JVM was designed to make software that would work across multiple platforms, and performance was an afterthought; and in many cases the JVM is particularly slow because other issues have taken priority over performance. If you're Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo and you're designing your own VM (or modifying an existing VM) to produce a high performance gaming system it is likely that you will make substantially different choices.

To give up 10% of CPU performance in a day and age where games are not CPU bound to ensure forward compatibility regardless of which CPU you choose in the future seems entirely reasonable and practical.

PhysX needs 16 unified shaders to work. The RSX doesn't even have unified shaders.

AMD and Nvidia GPU's are compatible, most of you are talking out of your ass when you say "NOT COMPATIBLE OH NOES"

They WILL go AMD, Nvidia screwed Sony with RSX pricing.

Up until Android 2.2 the Dalvik Android JVM was purely an interpreter, but now it has JIT compilation. Which version is the graph comparing?

While it is not as simple CISC-to-RISC based emulation has been around at least before the 1990's. Back then the differences between CISC and RISC were more pronounced. (Ever since the introduction of the Pentium line of chips, 586 and higher, more CISC based operations have been introduced into the CISC archetechture, with the introduction of SIMD instructions.) Because I had a Mac nut friend (before Mac and Apple where cool) And he showed off an emulator that allowed Windows to be run on his Mac, which at time required CISC-to-RISC emulation. So for a company that makes programs for both RISC and CISC based arctectures, the emulation of the CPU wouldn't be much of a problem.

The BC compatiblity issues where caused by the break up of Microsoft and nVidia. Unlike CPU's where the machine code can be considered "open source", the GPU code is owned by either ATi or nVidia, so Microsoft had two opitions either pay nVidia royalties for direct use of its code in its emulation or find work arounds. Microsoft tried to work around the coding issue but there where still quite a few of their discs that would work. So as you edit suggests it was patenting issues without the use of the code Microsoft couldn't reproduce some of the procedures on ATi's card. (And such would be the case if some one went from ATi to nVidia.)

Yes, and Nintendo. 

If they all use similar innards in their consoles, it will make multiplatform development a lot easier, and cut the load on 3rd parties. The only bad that could come out of this, for Sony, is that Backward Compatiility would be a lot harder. 

Fully agree. PSN/XBL games have made B/C a non-negotiable must have for all MS and Sony console generations after this one.

Don't AMD and Nvidia both make gpus for PCs? Pretty sure I have an AMD in my Dell. I shouldn't think it's that hard for 3rd parties to readily accomodate AMD and Nvidia gpu development given PC devs have to do it. Every multi game comes out for PC so every multi game is gonna have to run on AMD and Nvidia gpus. So reasoning that PS4 should have AMD gpu because MS and Ninty do is flawed logic I reckon.

going AMD doesn't mean squat regarding Backwards compatibility..... Sony is not dumb enough to make that mistake again. Ps4 will be backwards compatible.

Not really... Get of those AMD sunglasses, and I mean take the glue that was between your face and them... AMD tries to convince people with more graphic memory for the same price, which isnt really needed... 

And AMD still has an average driver support, I mean, before you neg me to hell google Rage AMD...