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.

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.

@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.