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PS4 and Xbox 720 due by 2012, says Crysis firm

Just our guess though, we don't know anything!

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The president of game developer Crytek has predicted that the successors to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 will appear within the next three to four years.

Cevat Yerli was hosting a talk titled "The Future of Gaming Graphics" at the ongoing GC Developer Conference in Leipzig, Germany, when he said that “the PlayStation 4 and Xbox '720' will arrive in 2011 or 2012”.

He stressed that the dates are “just our [Crytek’s] estimate” and claimed that neither Microsoft nor Sony have revealed any juicy next-generation console development timelines to him. But that's what his company is working to.

Yerli's forecast is reasonable. The PS2 launched in Japan in 2000, the PS3 in 2006. You'd expect the next console to debut five or six years beyond that.

Although news of a next-generation Xbox 360 is few and far between, talk of a PS4 isn’t new.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's VP of Technology, Paul Holman, confirmed way back in 2006 that a PS4 will be developed by Sony. Whilst Ken 'Father of the PlayStation' Kutaragi has previously rumoured that a PS4, 5 and 6 will be created. What, no PS7?

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Latest Comments

Non story

"He stressed that the dates are “just our [Crytek’s] estimate” "

So really, he's talking out of his ar$e. Trying to create a story with there isn't one.

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720? Not likely

It's pretty obvious to me that the only reason Xbox called their new console the 360 was for comparison reasons. You're in a shop and there are two machines on display, the Xbox 2 and the Playstation 3. Immediately the Xbox 2 appears worse to the uneducated eye, like how the guy from Spinal Tap fails to understand that because his amp goes up to 11 it's not necessarily any louder than one that goes up to 10.

Simple as. 360 starts with a "3" so it was chosen to compete with the PS3.

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@Highlander

I haven't been called sonny for 40 years and so I guess I should regard it as a complement.

My point is not that I am clever enough to work out the architecture of the PS4. My point is that a leading games industry figure and employee of SONY told me that the number of SPEs was due to rise (in a public lecture).

I did a trawl of the internet last night and have discovered that I am no longer the only person who thinks that the number of SPEs is due to rise. I discovered the following post in "ps4forums.org":

"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 is 32 SPEs and 4 PPEs (see page 10).

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?"

I have no idea if "ps4forums" is a reliable source of information. However I found similar specs in several other internet sites last night.

It also makes sense that the number of SPEs in the new Cell chip should be a power of 2 and not 20 as I had guessed.

My experience of ASIC design is that it is easy to increase the number of serial controllers on an ASIC. Most of the work is done by the ASIC design tool. I am sure that increasing the number of SPEs in a Cell processor would be equally straight forward.

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