Playstation 4 Cell Chip Due To Change?

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 for 32 SPEs and 4 PPEs.

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?

Edit: Since publishing this post the download link to the IBM .pdf is now broken. Sadly it seems the .pdf has disappeared entirely from the site, however i have managed to find a number of screenshots from the relevant pages mentioned above – hope that helps.

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5 Responses to “Playstation 4 Cell Chip Due To Change?”

  1. last year i attended a public lecture on game development by an employee of sony. in that lecture he said that more impressive games could be written for the ps3 than were possible on the xbox360 so long as full use was made of all six of the ps3s available spes.

    he said that looking to the future it was very important for developers to get used to using spes because future cell processors would include hundreds of spes. this prediction is agreement with your story that the ps4 will feature 32 spes. i guess that it is also an indication that the ps5’s cell processor will have 128 or 256 spes.

    paulm said this on August 21st, 2008 at 12:48 pm

  2. the link to the ibm website is broken. i would really like to read page 10. is this document available anywhere else?

    paulm said this on August 21st, 2008 at 1:15 pm

  3. Hi paulm, sorry about the broken link.

    I haven’t been able to find the missing PDF file but i did manage to locate some scans of individual pages – pages 10,11,16,17 and 22 – hope that helps.

    admin said this on August 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm

  4. The chip will have to have support disparate SPE’s to be a true gaming chip like AMD’s future plans. This way one of the SPE’s can be a graphics processor, another a physic processor, etc.
    That would make a bas a$$ chip. I think AMD would come out ahead, if IBM doesn’t plan this for the future of cell processors.

    Narutosan said this on September 13th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

  5. Wow. An even more powerful chip than the current Cell. The PS4 will be amazing.

    Also, is “100% backwards compatible” related to backwards compatibility with PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, or is it a reference to something else?

    JackS said this on April 6th, 2010 at 7:52 pm

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