'EAST FISHKILL - IBM East Fishkill workers were called to an all-hands-on staff meeting Thursday evening where they were told more work is coming their way.
Employees were told work will come to the Systems and Technology Group from Nintendo, Freescale and Sony.
IBM employs more than 9,000 at East Fishkill, Poughkeepsie and Sterling Forest. Managers told employees they did not anticipate hiring additional workers.
IBM officials could not be reached for comment.'

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So does this mean that the next generation games have officially started? Usually you'd hear a couple of years out from release about work being started, especially for companies which are using a third party like IBM.

East Fishkill was the site they developed the new Cell processor from. So pretty much you can believe that both Nintendo and Sony are developing their next generation systems starting now or have already started. This means that the earliest for the next generation will be late 2011 or 2012 depending on what they are actually doing with their systems.

Im sorry if you were hoping the generation would last longer because it looks like you're out of luck.

That seems about right.

Finally. MSFT is probably a year ahead of the competition by now though.

I would still be surprised if any next-gen console would be released later than in 2011.

This generation is just slowing down veryquickly in this year. It might be because of the economy, but it still means that the companies need new tricks. 

So who will MS be working with Squil? Or do you think they have not started the process yet?

It would be strange if Microsoft released their next console after Nintendo and Sony.

I'm hoping we can eventually come to a point where there's very little need for another "generation". There will be a point where you just can't get anything more than you already have. Btw, love the Sig Alterego-X. Epic.

Great Find Squilliam. I hope Ninty will be a bit more ambitious, and I hope Sony don't go and order all the most expensive parts again

I would say they have already started the process and the company they are working with is likely to be AMD for the GPU system, and maybe even the CPU. Now I don't know what the overall details of the system would be, but my guess is that its going to be heavily GPU compute biased to coincide with their development of direct X compute. The current Xbox 360 design is already GPU biased in terms of performance and I would expect that this would be even moreso the case for the generation coming up.

The question of who will make the CPU is a difficult one because they are Microsoft and there are so many different interests mixed up in everything. They have an abundance of programming talent and can litterally use any CPU they want, and they can litterally bring pretty much any CPU architecture into acceptance by supporting it with Windows if they so chose. However my current beliefs here centre around a low power CPU which can be used for embedded and low power handheld devices which can both run their mobile operating system and can scale up and offer a good perf/watt and perf/mm^2. Infact probably my best bet is an entire architecture which can be scaled between a handheld and a home console configuration and essentially kill two birds with one stone.

Taz! said: Great Find Squilliam. I hope Ninty will be a bit more ambitious, and I hope Sony don't go and order all the most expensive parts again

Sony seems to be pretty stubborn and if the PSP Go is any indication they don't appear to be taking the time to learn from their past mistakes.