Ben-DutkaWell, it was bound to happen at some point: "inside" whispers of the next PlayStation console, despite the fact that Sony repeatedly tells every media member they can find that the PS3 has a 10-year lifespan.
None of the following can be considered "official information," but it'll be super fun for all you tech geeks out there. Check out this massive article at GamingFront, and you will see how Sony supposedly intends to pursue the PS4 project. According to this, Sony plans to utilize the "Cell BE" (Cell Broadband Engine), and although the translation is broken, it seems that the PS4 won't be as crippling in terms of production costs. Basically, they've already secured the foundation with the PS3 and this will be built upon in the PS4; there would be no need to spend a gazillion more dollars on research and development, and they wouldn't have to produce an entirely new piece of technology designed from the ground up. On top of which, it seems Sony will reduce the chip size itself, which would again point towards lower costs. If all of this is to be believed, the PS4 will be the first PlayStation console that doesn't use a completely new hardware architecture. There are pluses and minuses to such an approach, but perhaps the former outweighs the latter…
First of all, if they're using the same base technology, developers won't be complaining (as they always do when a new PlayStation launches), because they'll be quite familiar. Secondly, the instantly lowered production costs means Sony won't have to operate in the red (or black) for so long; they could turn a profit much faster. Thirdly and finally, general improved reliability should come along with familiar hardware. Besides, it's not like the PS4 won't be a lot more powerful; it will be. Sony may just change their style a bit, that's all.
They are probably just talking about the PS3 Slimline.
* Modified Cell, make it twice as powerful as the one in PS3.
* 9800 GTX Video Card, custom-built for the PS4 with 2 graphic cards (they're cheap now, and will be much cheapier in the future).
* MEMORY PLEASE, 2Gigs of memory, DDR2 or even DDR3 since it'll be cheapier in the future.
* Keep Blu-ray, introduce something new and please make sure it is cheap.
Price looking towards for launch, no more than 300 US dollars.
9800GTX's will be so old by then that they would be impossible to find (I have one in the machine I'm using to type this lol). I would hope that a newer cell would be more than a mere double of what we see today. DDR3 will be at the end of it's life cycle, and seeing how RAM requirements are fast on the rise, I would expect 4GB of super-high performance RAM, or >10GB of DDR3.
There's no point on spending trillions on research when SOny has already done that already. Sony can now build up from the Cell and just make it more powerful and faster in the way Intel advances their tech.
Then for PS4 SOny can just add more memory and have allot of dedicated memory for the new advanced GPU from Nvidia.
How about a cell broadband gfx card, imagine that?
The Cell BE is WAY ahead of it's time, the chip is pretty different from other chips. This makes sense.
I just hope (ps3/ps2)=(ps4/ps3) in terms of power, or moore's law ps4 64tflops that would be epic, some nice ram ,L2, L1, great bandwidth & pioneer's 400gig bd, would just kill it for me.
GPU is old cell is powerful and this is a smart move, Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank, and Sony is improvising. So Sony needs to do this to gain all of that lost money back, and plus this is genius, cause to the time PS4 comes out its gonna be cheaper to be made, so in the end Sony laughs all the way to the bank!
This f*cking time, they better put B/C back in!
And for "ALL" the PS machines's, 1, 2, and 3!
One would hope right?
This is great great news!!
I really can't understand the worries. In fact I bet this was the plan all along. After all the cell is called that for a reason. Like the cells in a body it is designed from the ground up to connect to other cell processors for incomparably fast parallel processing.
It is about time that Sony let developers catch up with them. putting several processors in parallel will provide an incredible leap in processing power and by decreasing development costs they can put the money where it counts in more cells per ps4.
Developers will have already acquired skills in programming the new multi cell processor, but because the options in massively parallel processers are huge – ie where you assign each task – then it will still have the growth value that the ps3 currently has.
The power will be amazing, at a price that can compete and with awesome games from the get go.
I think ps4 will be the generation that makes us weep and first or at worst second generation games that look and play exactly like the tech demos