true but we don't really know how modified the the chip Sony may use would be if they clock it at 5GHz (I doubt it) it should outpace the CELL shouldn't it. and I would hope the GPU they use is top of the line if IMGTEC can pull it off is something else personally if the G300 chips are as powerful as Nvidia claim some reports peg it at over 2.5TFlops I don't really see the need for a powerful CPU at all. Mainly as Nvidia is Pushing CUDA that will allow processing that is usaly done on the CPU to be run quite well on the GPU.

Well, I don't see GPU replacing CPU anytime soon.

The raw computing power of GPUs is huge but that's very specialized. You can't execute complex logic on these. They have no branch predictors. Branch instructions are very expensive and they have wide registers. You still need a powerful CPU to compute complex logic like inner engine loops and gameplay tasks.

What you can do with GPUs is mostly rendering, skinning, physics, fluid simulation... That kind of mathematically intensive tasks. But that's it. They are even more specialized in stream processing than the SPUs actually. At least, you can do general computing with SPUs... It won't be very fast but that's acceptable... Line checks is probably the most obvious example of things you'll have a hard time doing on the GPU that you can quite easily do on the SPUs.

obviously that's why the power7 would be a good paring lol. But nvidia are relay trying to push CUDA and the G300 series as the first step to control all Processing in computers. they have made a lot of changes to the GPU design with multiple-instruction, multiple-data architecture and the edition of multi level cache etc. and other instruction set changes to allow better C++ support it is yet to be seen how this will play out in regard to rendering performance. still with phys-X all physics could be handled on the GPU and maybe AI leaving the CPU to handle the stuff that it does best

edit: an interesting article on the G300 http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,696377/G300-Fermi-Nvidia-focuses-on-GPU-Computing-Impressive-Raytracing-demo-shots/News/ real time ray tracing may be possible on nextgen consoles not that ray tracing is perfect but still.

Branch prediction in the console world is a non-issue, because all current cpu's are executing "in order" (i might be wrong on this!).

I agree with your statement, gpu's won't ever replace cpu's.

But in games, more workload is shifted onto the gpu.

It's more essential to have a fast gpu than a fast cpu.

The rumours and specifications of the PS4 have not yet been confirmed by Sony. Regardless of the specifications of the PS4 when it releases in the future. The PS4 will need to be reasonably priced at $399 from launch. Any higher and it will not sell well. PS3 was lucky to survive with its $599 launch price tag. To repeat the same mistake next generation would be catastrophic.