According to IBM the next-gen. Cell procesor is slated for 2010 to be 45nm and will have 2 PPEs and 32 SPEs. So thats roughly about 3-4 times what the PS3 has now. No info on clock speed or anything it is far too early. I expect it to be in 3.6-6.0 Ghz range. Since IBM is releasing the new Power6 server processors ranging from 4.0-5.0 Ghz in Mid-2007. The New Cell will very likely be in the next Playstation.
 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127433-c,cpus/article.html

IBM plans to crank up the speed on its Power6 server chip to 5.0GHz, far higher than competing processors from Intel and Sun Microsystems.
Despite its high frequency, the chip will avoid overheating through its small, 65-nanometer process geometry, high-bandwidth buses running as fast as 75GB per second, and voltage thresholds as low as 0.8 volts, IBM said.
When it ships the chip in mid-2007, IBM will target users running powerful servers with two to 64 processors, said Brad McCredie, IBM's chief engineer for Power6.

The company will ship several versions of the Power6 chip, ranging from 4.0GHz to 5.0GHz in frequency.

cool...
 
not that will be fun to program for

It depends on alot of stuff to be honest, it will be a bitch to program for but hopefully it will be easier than the PS3. They also need to make sure that the console does not overheat as the processor gets hot from the amount of work its doing. I would really hope that for the next generation of gaming, consoles from Sony and MS will have water cooling.

This is really good news for many including myself who are in the market for a new computer processor.  I really don't care what the Playstation 4 cost.  I'll get one of each next gen system no matter what.

actually gentleman, it wouldn't be a pain in the butt to program for.  Why?  Because by then the programmers would have been used to the whole Cell-CPU + GPU structure so it won't matter how many SPU units you have as you'll be able to leverage the concurrency of the device.  The reason why its a main now is because its new.  Its not the Emotion Engine.  Heck the Emotion Engine also caused quite a stir back in the day.  The smart thing to do is to stick with CELL.

sounds fricken awesome. Imagine the AI they could do with that and all the realtime extras. my god, photorealism here we come

i think that the reason they are having so much difficulty with the cell in terms of using each part of it is because until now most processors have been singular, so i wud say when they get used to using the cell 1.0, a move to 2.0 will not be as much hassle.Im sure cell 2.0 will have the same infrastructure as 1.0. It does appear that the cell is the new way in processor technology. It should be fun to see what it can do....

developers will get used to programming for ps3 eventually and they will get used to cell only to have to program for another one. i bet they wont be to happy with that.

Well of course IBM will make another Cell for the next PS4 that Sony will make Sony always gambles on there console that they make.

I am pretty sure that with the 32 core processors Intel plan to make by 2010, IBM, and AMD will make them as well so parrallel programming should pick up in a few years for multiple cores and things so this shouldn't be hard at all by 2010.
 
I find it interesting though that SPEs actually run AI better than other processors. So the Cell could one day be what kills us all with the next generation of robots, unmaned tanks, and planes.

20 years from now we will have toys with the PS3 cell processor in it..and the toys will talk to us, laugh with us, cry with us....and then when we are sleeping.....they......they..........
i feel terminator coming !
 
Edit:deadlyfire was ahead of me ~_o