When it comes to rumours about the next Xbox, there’s some wild speculation to get your teeth into.
But on the PlayStation 4 rumour mill, things were, until recently, turning much slower. As Kaz Hirai said earlier in the year: “we’re not deliberating on a PS4 or a next generation machine, whatever you call it.”
But on 26 May 2011, that stance appeared to change when Sony’s executive vice president and chief financial officer Masaru Kato seemingly confirmed that Sony is working on the PS4. The revelation took place during a conference call to investors where he was asked about increased R&D costs.
“This is a platform business, so for the future platform – when we’ll be introducing what product I cannot discuss that – but our development work is already under way, so the costs are incurred there,” Eurogamer reported him as saying.However, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on 31 May 2011, Kato denied that he was specifically referring to the PS4, saying “Some people misread what I said.”
In November 2011, PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan said it would be “undesirable” for PS4 to launch a while after the next-gen Microsoft Xbox console.
So what can we expect from the PlayStation 4?
The PS4 specs could abandon the Cell processor and return to x86…
In February, there were rumours of a failed Sony/IBM research project to develop a PowerPC chip for future PlayStations. Going forward, Sony will surely stick with the advanced, multi-core, bitch-to-develop-for Cell processor that it dropped $3 billion on. Here are three reasons why:
1. Easy backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 3
2. A familiar development environment. By 2015 (or whenever a PS4 comes out), games developers will have had much more experience working with Cell and its software tools
3. Toshiba recently sold its Cell factory in Nagasaki back to Sony for £400 million. Sony is hardly going to abandon the chip now it owns the means to manufacture it in bulk
…or it could move across to ARM
There are some rumours that PS4 could use Nvidia’s ARM-based Project Denver.
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