Will Sony keep Cell for Playstation 4?
Reports out of Japan suggest that the Cell chip could be used to power Sony’s Playstation 4 console. Using Cell would help reduce development costs for Sony, which spent billions on R&D for the Playstation 3. In addition, the move would also help Sony bring the PS4 to market sooner, a plan both Microsoft and Nintendo seem to have.
According to the article, Sony could increase the number of processing cores to 24 or even 32 in order to improve performance. Higher clock speeds could be in the cards as well. Add a next-generation ATI or NVIDIA GPU, Blu-ray optical drive, and DDR3 RAM, and the PS4 could be easily introduced in time to compete with Microsoft and Nintendo.
But with the complications and difficulties that quite a couple of developers have had with while designing for cell, will it get better? It seems to me like this move would just make the process of creating games for the system even more difficult, with the added cores and such. If that is the case, I would have thought Sony would want to learn from their mistakes and make the Playstation 4 easier to develop for and not build on what is an existing problem for them. There’s no point having the most powerful console if no one can take full advantage of it’s potential.
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