So PowerPC is dead you say?

[AJCopland]

It's the software that is impressive anyway. It wouldn't matter what hardware they run it on.
 
There is enough cores in that machine to satisfy all the current demand from the amiga community. If PowerPC were alive then they'd have spent less money and shipped motherboards to us all for free.
 
PowerPC is even dead in the console market. The next generation is abandoning it, except for Nintendo who are just taking the Wii and doubling the cpu cores.

This goes along the order of:
1) True,
2) True and hilarious,
3) False: There's a rumour that PS4 is an AMD CPU but it's not confirmed - the XboxNext/720/wtfever is probably (almost certinaly) PPC - Wii-U is a multicore PPC but it's not based on the older GameCube/Wii cpu.

PPC these days is disappointing in it's lack of publicly consumer facing usage. There's low-end upto 400MHz integrated PPC chips that get embedded in car GPS displays, then there's an enormous gap until you get to the Power7 stuff.

Actually back to games consoles, the real loser this coming generation appears to be nVidia! They pissed off MS back on the original Xbox with licensing costs and were the primary reason it was put to bed early. They're apparently out of the PS4. They were rumoured to be in the Nintendo 3DS but they aren't, and they lost out to AMD/Ati for the Wii-U.

In the coming console generation, they make PPC seem positively bouncing with life

[AJCopland]

PowerPC in classic Amiga looks dead.
I think our Classic future (now there's a confused concept!) lies in FPGA based recreations like fpgaarcade and 68k cores like the tg68 etc.

Andy

[AJCopland]

even the Playstation 4 isn't abandoning it entirely (though why they need an entirely different CPU architecture in an x86 box with an explicit lack of backwards compatibility is beyond me.)

If they are abandoning the PPC/Cell combo, and I'd bet they are, it's because their partners pulled out of Cell development. So they're faced with either:
1) paying for a new CPU to be developed,
2) paying for further development of the Cell and marrying it to either a newer PPC core or another ISA,
3) or they can take an off the shelf CPU/Mobo/GPU and come within a few percentage either side of their competitors whilst saving a HUGE (billions dollars) amount of money.

I think they've chosen route #3 because finally someone slightly less insane is at the helm at Sony.

Nothing to do with ease/difficulty of Cell software development or anything either, I think it's purely a logical choice based on monetary needs.

Andy

[AJCopland]

If anything ever finally "kills" the desktop PC, it'll be something akin to this:
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

Not necessarily Linux/Ubuntu/etc, I just mean that as phones get powerful enough (and my phone isn't far behind my laptop already!!!) the need for a separate desktop PC is reduced for a lot of people.

It is a bit odd that we've got Atom(x86), MIPS and ARM in mobiles but not PPC though.

[AJCopland]

We'll see. The word from a game developer I know who has a Wii-U is that it is. It would be stupid of him to lie, but it might not be the final product. The first Wii devkits were basically gamecube devkits with extra bits added. Although with the launch not that far off, they'll need to get a move on.
 
The "based on POWER7 architecture" is probably just marketing talk. Like Nintendo did when they said the N64 was based on a Silicon Graphics workstation. It sort of was, just a heavily cut down version of an older generation. The POWER7 is not actually that fast to start with though, watson is fast because there are >2000 of them.
 
After the hard to program PS3, I would expect the PS4 to be a linux based x86-64 box with a lot of GPGPU cores used with OpenCL. The 720 is a tougher call, but something similar with windows instead of linux & directcompute instead of opencl would not suprise me.

You could say that PS3 was "linux-based" it'd be stretching the truth a bit but PS4 will be "linux-based" in the same way. As for OpenCL, not sure, it's a GPU from AMD/Ati that much is almost certain but they have their own GPGPU stuff, like Brooke, so might favour that instead.

I almost took a job on a Wii-U project but after developing for the Wii I have been seriously put off ever working on a Nintendo platform again. Friends tell me that they've gotten better but that's easy when you're the worst platform to develop on! Anyway, interesting that your friend says it's still based on the old CPU. I'd personally have thought it'd make more sense to just include that rust bucket and the entire Wii hardware on a single extra chip whilst using a newer multi-core design for the rest. Oh well.

Xbox720/Next, it'll be more of the same dashboard and DirectX11 & DirectCompute with the same extra access for those willing to use it. Just like the X360 but a lot faster, fix the negatives with the Xenon CPU - out of order would be nice but who knows wtf we'll actually get.

I think I'd like to get back into console dev', been doing mobile development instead for the last 4 months and it's a world of crap in comparison!