A lot of PS4 rumors coming in all at once, has anyone contacted Sony about them?

well the US airforce bought 2200 new ps3s to make smthing smthing smthing for clearer radar images lol

PS4 doesn't need huge power upgrade for processor. It just needs a lot more Ram and good GPU. GPU is a lot more important for games nowadays than processor. Just little upgrade for Cell and at the same time they get BC with PS3.

To IBM the Cell processor was probably a project that gave them a massive budget from Sony to do (almost) pure research and development; and I don’t think IBM really saw much commercial value in the Cell processor being that they released the Power 6 architecture at (roughly) the same time. At this point IBM has probably gotten everything they wanted from the Cell (hundreds of man years of chip development research on Sony's dime) and without further external funding they probably see no value in continuing developing the processor.

Well here is something, Peter Moore back when he was at MS, stated the next Xbox was in 2011 or 2012, so you can bet that if that timetable holds true, and no reason to expect it not to, that the next Playstation will be around that time as well, so Sony may be close to deciding what the next chips in the PS4 will be

If there's no BC I'd be pissed that I spent millions making a game engine, only to have to throw it away to make a new game engine.

Last I checked Sony is a "hardware" company and all this means is that Sony has the prototype and the finished product.  They can farm out the fabrication to any firm willing to manufacture the Cell; dead in the water seems like a miss leading thread title to me.  Plus they have the technology so they (Sony) can make improvements on it with the help of contracted IBM engineers.  I believe the thread is meant purely for flaimbait (or vgdollars)......nothing more to see, everyone move along.

That's not how game engines work ...

To port the engine to a different architecture (with how most game engines are developed and with how many architectures they already support) tends to be a couple weeks work from a couple of developers; assuming (of course) that the system you're porting the engine to is capable of handling the engine without major modification.

I really don't have any idea how it works.

I just assumed since PS2 backwards compatibility didn't seem that straight forward. The 2 god of war games took a few months, and the cell is way more powerful than the previous PS2 chip. I thought that since some engines that are on the cell require using the SPEs in a specific way, it wouldn't translate easily to something else.

I think Sony over-estimates the value of the cell to gaming or any other "custom" processor. ITs basically just a selling point to ubber geeks who care about FLOPS, GHz and other junk like that.

For next gen, MS, Sony and Nintendo need to pick up a good, current and specifficaly for gaming designed processor from the existing CPU manufacturers and concentrate on providing tools to developers to lower development cost and make development easier.

At this point, all companies should know that great games make a great console not an ubber hardcore CPU.