PS4 GPUs and the CELL

PlayStation 4 to use AMD GPUs

This is pretty obvious I think. AMD supply the GPU for the Xbox 360 and the Wii (and the GameCube before that). Microsoft used nVidia chips in the original Xbox, but abandoned them in favour of AMD (then ATi) for reasons I forget (I should probably research that but I'm feeling lazy tonight and I still have a bunch of work to do).

Sony used the junk nVidia chip currently in the PS3 because nVidia were willing to cut them a good deal. nVidia had been snubbed by Microsoft and they were pretty pissed about it. The Radeon core used in the Xbox 360 was also superior to the older design nVidia offered Sony. Presumably this decision was made entirely on price - this is the time that Kutaragi-san was being quietly removed from Sony and a lot of last minute decisions were being made to make the Playstation 3 into a competitive machine (and many of the sacrifices were performance ones - I would love to have seen where the PS3 would be today if it had retained the dual-CELL CPU design originally planned. Prohibitive price would have destroyed the Playstation brand however, in my opinion.

This would be a logical step for Sony. My bigger curiosity is whether Sony will continue to use a CELL-based CPU, given that most of the original design consortium have abandoned it.