I have yet to see anything on POWER8 so your ahead of me there.  Even if MS is using a derivative set of instructions it does not mean it will not be compatible with the POWER7, as we would have to know if they have more instructions or a subset of the POWER7 instruction set.  The same with Broadway.  If they have added instructions then it would rule out an off the shelf solution without some middleware to deal with it for backwards compatibility.  As for developer ease the instruction set differences between them should be easy to hide from developers by the compiler as they will not change a lot in architecture by replacing the CPU with a standard IBM CPU.

The CELL is not going to be simple in its current form.  That the various cores are so different that you have to know what goes where.  Getting around that will not be easy as some of the elements of it that are so powerful are tied to that.  The SIMD SPEs let it do a lot of certain types of work but that they are SIMD while the the PPE is a fused multiply-add processor, it can solve 2 y=ax+b type problems per cycle, keeps this complex.  Removing the SPEs would hurt it in graphics programming, and in scientific programming, but shifting the PPE would make life harder for regular programming type needs.  Probably from a development standpoint doing something like is done on Roadrunner and adding a completely secondary powerful general purpose processor would make life easiest.

Cost I have no clue on.  The problem of dealing with these makes life hard on the console makers as they need to sell a lot to get scale based discounts.  The easiest solution would be for them to try and do what Sony aimed to do, use a processor that was supposed to be used in a lot of other things.  The problem though is consoles are frozen in time while everything else moves on and you might be wrong to start with.  If they all used the same processor they could perhaps help this but that would probably hurt their marketing and encourage even more multiplatforming.

it has more to due with instruction sets being removed, braodway uses instruction sets not in latter chips, the little endian(i think thats the right spelling) which has not been in powerpc since power5. the power5 that the 360 uses is highly modified, and uses added features not found in power5 main line chips, to boost loating points and what not. i agree with you on the cell, it will be hard to streamline any upgrade, but if anyone could do it ibm could.  

Little Endian to Big Endian conversion is no big deal.  You can actually deal with it in the ordering of bits on the bus, it has been done in a lot of other machines evolution as time has gone on.  Added instructions is a big deal and would require middleware for BC but not likely to be a giant problem and practically invisible to developers as the compiler should shield them from most of it.

true, but ive seen quite a few apps, that are just destroyed in terms of speed, see software on the mac with the g4 to g5 switch. the rest of it i agree with, side note the velocity engine or alvetch as its called is stripped to, something though complex i felt would have added some great graphical ability, thats not required to be used

Sorry for the late response, goddog, but nothing in that article did anything to undermine the point I made:

1. You said in the OP that the PS4 would use the same exact chip as the PS3. "same chip, nothing new"
2. The articles mention using at least 10 cores in the PS4 Cell chip.
3. The PS3 Cell chip has less than 10 cores.
4. Therefore the PS3 and PS4 Cell chips will not be identical and therefore you were wrong or misspoke.

I went throught and reread the japanese artical it is based on to respond to you and it brings up several posibilities, one of which is ten cores, but dismisses them all in its belief that the ps4 will be out in 2011 to beat the nextbox, and that changeing the cell would add uneeded cost and complication to development and for devs. the artical i origially posted does a really poor job of explaing the japanese artical its based on

also thanks for the reply no problem for the late

With today's surfaced news that Nintendo is targetting the Wii 2 for 2011 as well looks like it'll be showdown time by then.

I'm sure all three manufacturer have 2011 as their target. MS wanted a longer 360 lifespan for profitability and given prior history. MS would have assumed that Sony and Nintendo would have a successor ready 5 years after they launched their current hardware. Sony doesn't want MS to get the jump on them again so they would have been targeting 2011 as well. Nintendo has churned out new hardware every 5 years over the past three generations. So, 2011 would have been a likely target for them as well.

Same chip due to dev learning curve. Most games take longer to dev on PS3 because of the CELL. I say they should toss it for more PC-orientated CPU/GPU in my opinion. It would make things easier.

OK, I did miss that part.  Thanks for the correction. 

But as for whether the speculation turns out to be true, I have to say that with the pace of technology advancement it would be extremely easy to have a considerably more powerful version of the Cell instead of just the same chip and still stay very cost effective -- in fact if Sony "did a Wii" this is exactly what would happen since the Wii is much more powerful than the Gamecube, just less of an advancement than the other two.