I doubt that Nintendo will leave IBM, since their partnership is successful since GameCube days.

#(double post)#

I garuntee it's not Sony..if both MS and Nintendo currently use AMD products though, it's kind of a toss up..I thought there were rumors about the 360 using a new intel chip that's similar to an upgraded cell? Maybe I'm thinking of another story and kind of just blending it in with this..whatever I'm thinking of was a while back so my thinking is a little bit cloudy.

Um I thought 360 CPU was developed by IBM??? Not AMD.

Uhm.. So if X360 +1 will have x86-64, my crystal ball works well after all. ^^

Anyway, if Sony will bring some CELL crap on the market to compete with x86-64, it would mean pretty much end of playstation(Or atleast incredible losses...). Devs won't want to play around with 'incredible' CELL just to get it work while competitors are half way ready with their games. :P

 if so, I like IBM as well :D AMD is just for the GPU?

Yes, AMD owns ATI which makes the GPUs for both Wii and the X360.

If true, it would pretty much have to be Microsoft. Nintendo's been in a good place with PowerPC technology. In fact, i suspect that their next console will be very architecturally similar to the 360, since the Xenos is more or less a natural evolution of Gaming-dedicated PowerPC into a multicore form, and ATI (AMD, ArtX) have also been good to Nintendo in the past

Sony's staked a lot of R&D on the Cell, and it's scalable architecture, so they'll probably pull somewhat of a Wii (not necessarily that it will be a weak tech upgrade, but that it will be fully, natively backwards compatible due to identical architecture)

One question is, can IBM make a CPU that ain't powerhungry and run on low temperature at least twice the power of Wii CPU? If not, maybe AMD is better choice.

Seems likely after all. If CPU and GPU are on the same dice, AMD could make a very cheap offer compared to both on their own dice (and even more when AMD manufactures both, no joint venture with anyone).

The contract sounds like one that Nintendo would make, although this doesn't mean others wouldn't make similar contracts. In any case, all three are likely making R&D with their future manufacturing partners.

And, the processor isn't necessarily CISC processor.