ohm wrote:Speaking of which, I kinda wonder what will be in the PS4. I doubt it will be a Power variant since to my knowledge, IBM is mostly designing server chips (IBM has never been able to manufacture low cost products)
Actually - IBM has a couple of different POWER divisions. The team that designed the PowerPC core for the Cell is still going full tilt, to the best of my knowledge. They are completely separate from the server team - they're the ones located in Austin, TX - the embedded division.
This team did the PowerPC core for the Cell, the triple PowerPC core for the Xbox 360, and the PowerPC chip in the GameCube/Wii. This team at IBM is doing extremely well right now - they have high speed designs at low power - very popular with OEMs. Unless ARM starts moving aggressively in this direction - and I think they are - IBM will probably continue to have a hammerlock on this technology.
If you want to find out more about this team, I suggest you read this book:
The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3This really explains why IBM has dominated this market.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. The book also explains why Apple never got a low power POWER G5. The quick summary is that the PPU was originally started as the G5 for Apple. The Austin team designed the PPU and G5 in parallel. Then, when they added the 360 development to the mix, they had three customers using the exact same design. In order to hold to Sony's & Microsoft's aggressive time frame, they started dropping features. When they dropped out-of-order processing - absolutely necessary for servers, but not necessary for game consoles - Apple got furious and jumped teams to the IBM POWER server division. This set the stage for the eventual defection to Intel, since the Server team was unable to achieve the power consumption targets of the Austin team.