Electronista and several other news outlets are reporting on a recent item posted on Impress (a Japanese tech site) that reveals several technical details about the Playstation 4. It’s no secret that Sony has invested a great deal into the Cell architecture with IBM and Toshiba, while investors and analysts cry from the sidelines about how much the company is spending on development. However, did Sony take such a huge hit so they could base future iterations of the console on this technology? It would make alot of sense now, especially as tweaks to the existing hardware would still keep it way beyond any console available today. Even the next version of the XBox360 will probably be just slightly better than the PS3 in terms of hardware specifications.
Electronista writes, “The Cell chip itself is likely to speed up but is most likely to see a more modest upgrade than possible. Sony plans to shrink the chip from a 90 nanometer process down to 45 nanometers but is expected to at most increase the number of cores from eight to 12 and may only increase the clock speed slightly over the 3.2GHz Cell in use for the PS3 today.
Sony is also allegedly considering a change in memory from the very fast but expensive Rambus XDR memory in the PS3 to low-power DDR3.”
Sony Insider speculates that Sony will probably revamp the SIXAXIS motion sensing ability as well, and maybe we will finally see a new controller for the PS4. We have nothing to base this on, but it is obvious that motion and touch based inputs are becoming all the rage and Sony will have to realize this accordingly.
