PS4 Zone

Here’s some technical information on a possible new cell chip for the PS4. We’ve heard about the Cell 3 chip with 32 SPEs and 2 PPEs, well it seems IBM are due to change all that. The new possible chip now is the design for 32 SPEs and 4 PPEs.

Some features of the new chip:

100% backward compatible
Performance on PPE significantly better
Performance per SPE equal or better
Significantly better on applications that benefit from new instructions
Better inter-SPE latency
More on-chip memory
Better main memory latency and bandwidth

Apparently IBM are aiming for 1 TeraFLOPS of performance with this new chip. To put that into perspective the current Playstation 3 Cell chip is only capable of 204 GigaFLOPS.

The new cell is projected for around 2010/2011, with 2011 rumored to be the year we’ll see a PS4 release…coincidence?

Edit: Since publishing this post the download link to the IBM .pdf is now broken. Sadly it seems the .pdf has disappeared entirely from the site, however i have managed to find a number of screenshots from the relevant pages mentioned above – hope that helps.

As part of our rumor round-up here at ps4forums.org, we thought we’d cover some speculation as to the hardware specifics of the Playstation 4.

According Reuters Sony, IBM and Toshiba have all extended their parterships with Sony, pledging to invest even more funds into next-generation chip designs. The next generation chipsets will dramatically smaller and massively more powerful, the focus will be on development of technology below 32-nanometer die sizes – the Playstation 3 currently uses 65-nanometer die sizes to give you an idea of scale.

Whether this Cell technology is intended for the Playstation 4 or an updated Playstation 3 model is not yet known, although it would make a lot of sense for Sony to lay a strong technological foundation for an upcoming console.