PS4 to ditch The Cell processor?

The next iteration of Sony’s PlayStation console will not feature the much-touted Cell processor, according to new reports.

The Cell was the famous love child of former PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi, who believed its expensive development would be rewarded by its eventual use in more or less every aspect of modern living. Which was wrong, clearly.

However, while Cell has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool for developers who managed to get to grips with it (Naughty Dog, Guerrilla), it also alienated large swathes of the development community who lamented the extra work needed to get Xbox 360 and PC titles to run satisfactorily on Sony’s machine.

Kutaragi retired from Sony last year.

Now Kotaku reports that sources” have told it The Cell will be dropped completely from Sony’s in-development PS3 successor.

Furthermore, it goes on to speculate that Sony’s rumoured decision to hand over CPU and GPU development duties to AMD will speed up hardware development time significantly.

With a speculated architecture that’s the same as some PC systems already on the market, there’s nothing to stop developers kicking off next-gen PS4 games development immediately. As in, now.

One thing we do know is that Sony doesn’t want to be left behind this time.