Following up on news broken by Kotaku on Sony's next PlayStation, IGN is reporting that the console codenamed Orbis will use two AMD chips for graphics and processing.
Citing unnamed sources, the article says that the Orbis might be sporting AMD's A8-3850 APU and Radeon HD 7670 GPU. The 7670 is an update of the 6670, the graphics component that's rumored to be inside the next Xbox. This means that both Microsoft and Sony's future consoles could be pretty evenly matched.
This chain of speculation seems to bear out previous reports that Sony will be abandoning the Cell processor—the result of a Sony/Toshiba/IBM partnership—that currently powers the PS3. If the next generation PlayStation and Xbox machines have similar insides, their parent companies may be more reliant than ever on exclusive franchises to find an edge.
Sources Detail the PlayStation 4's Processing Specs [IGN, via The Verge]
DISCUSSION
I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to this stuff, so what does Sony gain by losing the Cell processor? I know that not having it pretty much kills the possibility of playing PS3 games on the new system, but wouldn't that also mean that the new system wouldn't be able to play the PS3's downloadable games? So I'm guessing that there's some sort of advantage to ditching the Cell processor, right?