The cell processor is great, even with todays standards. But the rest of PS3 architecture is abysmal.

Same with the Vita, great tech on paper, but the end product suffers from poor technical design, so graphical games like Uncharted or Liberation only could use half screen resolution (so the same resolution as 3DS!) and look really disappointing for gamers who believed the "a console experience on the go" marketing line.

Sony really needs better technicians who know how to use and create really great tech for console.

Oh also it's also worth noting Intel was once developing a CPU similar to the CELL in many ways codenamed Larrabee. Which was meant to have 32+ stripped down x86 CPU cores (with a dedicated texture unit in each core, 4 way multithreading with in order execution, and a very wide SIMD unit for floating point math) back in 2010, in 2009 a prototype offered 1 TFLOP at 1GHz well over 4x that of the CELL (graphics performance would likely have also been much better than the CELL thanks to the dedicated hardware as well) after sinking $4-4.5 billion into the project they decided to roll the tech into their traditional CPUs and intergrated GPU projects and skrap the project as performance was not competitive with modern GPUs.

i think developers aim only for one thing: money. yes, a high-end-pc is most probably even better by now than what we can expect from next-gen-consoles but i am sure games will be developed for consoles due to very good sales-numbers. well, pc-sales are hard to count nowadays with digital distribution but i highly doubt that assassin's creed 3, for example, sold nearly the numbers it did on consoles (not to mention both consoles combined...). i think the situation will be like it was the last years: the pc *is* of course technically more advanced but 1. it is not really used by games and 2. it is quite expensive to develop a game especially for consoles and again for pc so i think pc will still get ports the next years, with polished graphics.

I lost interest in following the PhysX stuff. It started with dedicated PPUs (Aegis or whatever it was called), dedicated graphic cards, then went to doing it in existing GPUs. The former solutions are too expensive for average Joe, the bechmarks I'd seen of the latter had (sometimes very) dramatic decreases in fps (no surprise here, and I think only a few games actaully tried it).

The current source I am inclined to believe based on track record says PS4 is Spring 2014, AMD CPU+GPU.

Except that America is the largest market for video game HOME consoles, and Home consoles only launch during the holidays in America (Sept - December).

They never launch during the spring.

So it's either HOliday 2013.....or HOliday 2014.

There's a first time for everything!