[Report] PlayStation 4 to ditch Sony’s Cell Processor

According to a a new report from Kotaku, the PlayStation 4 won’t be using Sony’s Cell Processor, which Sony debuted with the PlayStation 3, nor any form of a successor of it.

The report, which cites “gaming industry sources”, follows a recent rumor from Forbes which has it that Sony is looking to AMD to develop the GPU for the as-yet unannounced successor to the PlayStation 3.

The Cell Processor had a bit of a reputation among developers for being notoriously difficult to program for. Sony developed the complex chip to give the PlayStation 3 a leg up over the Xbox 360 in terms of processing power, but it turned out to be at the cost of making it more difficult to develop for the PlayStation 3.

Kotaku reports:

“Cell was the pet project of PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi, who dreamed that the chip—a “Power Processing Element” married to eight “Synergistic Processing Elements”—would make the PS3 the most impressive gaming console ever. He spoke of a home equipped with multiple devices that were powered by Cell, all of them linking to each other to increase the computational power driving any of the devices.”

Sony has yet to confirm the existence of the PlayStation 4, much less what kind of hardware will be included in it, and it doesn’t look like they will be anytime soon. Earlier this month, Sony’s Jack Tretton said that announcing a new console this year would be a “distraction”.

As expected, Sony declined to comment on the report.