So PowerPC is dead you say?

[psxphill]

The answer is a bit mundane... But IBM own the rights to the Power Architecture and use it for all their custom CPU work. They don't need or want to be slaves to AMD and Intel.

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.

[psxphill]

Wii-U is a multicore PPC but it's not based on the older GameCube/Wii cpu.

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.