It might be a little early to advertise rumors involving the next tier of gaming consoles, but this might prick up a few ears: Sony has apparently spread the word that the PlayStation 4 will utilize IBM’s upcoming iteration of its CPU architecture, the POWER7 CPU.
The PlayStation 3 already boasts some serious hardware under its hood, and the results show; with the potential of nearly 15 GFLOPS (that’s about 15 billion operations per second, folks) and a hefty 256MB video card to boot, it’s no wonder that the PS3’s "Cell" processor can play host to some of the most striking visual imagery this side of the raging console vs. PC war. Heck, it’s even being employed as a supercomputer network.
The POWER7 architecture looks to expand upon the stellar performance output of the PS3’s hardware by increasing processing power to nearly ten-fold of its predecessor–a staggering 200 GFLOPS.
Some additional technical specs for the geek-inclined includes quad-core threading, a 24-32MB L3 cache, and a 4.0GHz clock. Sony will be using a custom-trimmed, "cost-effective" version to meet the criteria for the PS4’s production.
As if contemporary video games weren’t jam-packed full of graphical goodness already, we get fed this little morsel of next-gen nirvana. I can only guess as to what the POWER7 is capable of delivering in terms of video games–maybe make that bead of sweat rolling down Snake’s neck in Metal Gear 12: Cousins of Sons of Guns of Liberty and Patriots that much more crystalline.
