Sony has announced that their next gen console is now in development. So we now have Sony's new one in development, Nintendo's new being shown at E3 and even Microsoft are starting to hire for it's new console too. Next gen is not that far off.
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/05/27/sony_earnings/ According to the article, Sony is gonna invest less in the PS4 development then it was for the PS3.
So that's a bad thing right? Why would they do this? I wouldn't have thought the PSN outage would've hit them so hard that they'd have to hold back on their next money maker. I'm confused by these figures: Does that mean those numbers are as follows? 1. One million five hundred and seventy nine thousand three hundred million. 2. Eight hundred and thirty three thousand million. 3. Three hundred and fifty six thousand million. Lol.
I'm guessing Fall 2012 is when we'll see these things launch. @Armadeadn It has nothing to do with the outage. Sony blew billions of dollars that it didn't really need to on development of the Cell architecture for the PS3. It would have been easier and cheaper for them to have gone with an existing CPU design from intel, AMD, or IBM. The Cell ended up being difficult to program and a bit underwhelming.
Ah ok. You think we'll see these consoles in the shops in just over a years' time? I was thinking more along the lines of 2013/2014 since the current consoles still have plenty of life in them. They've just gotten motion control too you'd think they'd want to milk that shit for a bit longer. Plus I don't remember a console coming out around 15 months after the manufacturer announced it was in development. I could be wrong but I don't think we'll be seeing them anytime soon, excluding Cafe of course.
My guess.. Nintendo 2012 M$ Late 2013 Sony 2014/2015 Sony want to make as much money back as possible on the PS3 and they have repeated over and over again that it is a 10 year life span (2006-2016). HOWEVER if the next Nintendo console is a proper HD console that destroys the PS3 and 360 in the graphics department they might be forced to bring the PS4 forwards as more and more people jump on the big ship N.
I'm concerned that Nintendo are doing a Sega by bringing out their next gen console so much earlier than the competition so by the time PS4 and New Xbox come out people will be bored of the Nintendo console and want to buy the new ones. Dreamcast released too early. By the time PS2 and Xbox came out people were getting bored of the DC and wanted the new consoles = Sega knocked out of the console race.
Sega had been failing in the previous round however, the Saturn was a disaster and before that so too were the Mega Drive add ons. Nintendo have made big bucks from the Wii and its still top of the sales pile despite its poor hardware and big gaps between AAA titles (the only titles worth buying on the console). Also the PS2 launched before the GC and XBOX and it smashed both of them.
I'm guessing something like this; Wii2 - 2012 Xbox 3/720 - Late 2013 PS4 - Early to mid 2014 Xbox and PS will be a generation ahead of Wii 2 but will both be fairly similar to eachother. Both will use less high end processors (CPU and GPU) than last gen in the context of what is available at the time of launch.
Hadnt IBM stopped the development of the Cell? @ Armadeadn, no it doesnt have to be a bad thing, the hardware just wont be as 'high end' as the PS3 hardware was for its time. Probally cheaper build quality aswel. Most rumors are saying the next consoles (PS4/next Xbox) get to see the light around 2014, seems most likely aswel.
I would agree. I think we'll see minimum of 1 year between Nintendo's next machine and the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony. I'm curious to see the design of Sony's next console. They could go with a more traditional design this time, I think is likely, or they could go with a somewhat modest update of their current architecture, with the most significant upgrades relating to RAM and GPU.
I think that is the only way we will see PS3 backwards compatibility. If they use a completely different CPU architecture then I can't see us ever being able to play PS3 games on the PS4. I would guess emulating CELL probably isn't the easiest job in the world, they couldn't even emulate the EE properly. IF they do stick with CELL at least now developers know how to use it but they would surely have to increase its clock speed a bit. Perhaps even add more cores or even a second CELL otherwise it might fall behind the M$ and Nintendo offerings with more modern powerful CPU's.
I'd actually prefer they stick with the Cell personally, but if they do I want significantly more RAM. By a "modest update," I meant somewhat faster components, including an updated, somewhat quicker Cell, but not as big of a jump in power as PS2 to PS3 (and more importantly, not risk bankruptcy on a massively expensive device). I think the difficulty of programming for an updated Cell is going to be somewhat overestimated; if they added significantly more RAM that wasn't divided in half, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult to use. It's difficult with the PS3 because each individual SPU has a very limited amout of memory available. They could improve upon this substantially with a better setup with the memory. In addition, developers already have some software tools using a Cell-type architecture they could adapt to a Cell-equipped PS4. There was basically nothing available at the beginning of this generation for PS3 developers because their architecture was completely new. This would not be a huge issue like it was in 2006. As for the GPU, this tech always seems to move very fast. I'd probably get a tentitive idea of what I wanted to use the latest available tech as they get closer to finalizing it. Graphics cards get outdated so quickly.
I fully expect Microsoft to release something quite powerful next time round and I also expect Sony to be wary of this when designing the PS4. I don't think they can afford to be too relaxed with the spec otherwise they risk being left behind. Microsoft and Nintendo made massive gains in sales shares with the generation (Sony are still in 3rd place aren't they?) and to get those people back in the Sony camp they are going to need to release something that wows people back. Sony probably still have the strongest 3rd party title games but if Nintendo or Microsoft get things right next time around I can see even more developers going multi-platform with those AAA games or even jumping ship to whatever console has the most muscle. Who could have seen Square-Enix releasing FFXIII on a Microsoft console last generation? I still expect Sony to be able to deliver something special on a tighter budget. The big R&D costs of CELL and Blu-Ray are no longer in the way and because of that I hope they can deliver something as powerful if not more powerful than the other 2 contenders. Do you really think they can squeeze that much more out of it? Its already clocked at 3.2GHz, can it go any faster without burning out? I had a quick look on Wiki and there doesn't seem to have been any developments to Cell since it went 45nm in the PS3 slim. Like you say it won't do anyone any good if Sony spend too much and go bankrupt, is putting more R&D into CELL more money for old rope? We haven't seen Intel in the console game this generation and their PC cpu's have come on leaps and bounds, the 'core i' series adapted for a console might be quite tasty and probably not too expensive either.
In order to reduce costs, I expect Sony will just glue two Cell processors together and improve the SPUs so that they don't run on 12kb of data at a time. Memory bandwidth/throughput should be addressed so it's less like that Gaming through Post thing that grim was an advocate of. Hopefully that should fix PS2 emulation since that was a mipmapping nightmare. They would do well to make their prototypes look as basic as possible, no more 12 HDMI ports and 6 ethernet sockets. Just bung a co-axial socket and be done with it.
@Grim I'm not exactly sure what they've been doing with their R&D budget regarding the PS4. They won't say anything yet. I was suggesting the possiblity of an updated version of the Cell, not just an overclocked version of the current Cell. If no work has gone into that since the original Cell, obviously they'd need to go with something else. I certainly wouldn't object to something derived from Intel's "core i" line if that provides the best cost/benefit advantage.
I think the 360 and the Wii should combine and become the Ballet Dancing Dike or the BDD. Forget your 720 or your wiis...