The chip was too expensive because of how the costing was worked out.
As far as Intel compatibility is concerned, there's always AMD (and to som extent IBM).
As long as the contract is solid, I think MS (and Sony) would jump into bed with anyone.

And also, please don't refer to the CELL as a super computer, clustering 50 CPUs of any sort would provide some serious computing power, the CELL is a good number cruncher though because of it's pipelining architecture... anyway I'm waffling.. But yes, MS and Sony would bed anyone if the contract was right..

Sony sold thier cell development and research plant to Toshiba like a mounth and a half ago for about 850 million. Sony no longer produces those cell chips, and no longer care for it. Sony could look to Intel if Intel does have something mind blowing to appeal them (which won't happen)

I don't think that Sony has abandoned the CELL. They sold a factory and stepped out of the 35nm research. I also think, they see no immediate need to research in the CELL at this time. Given the high investments into the CELL I would assume, they took a step back to consolidate. Who knows where they'll be in two years from now. Would be interesting to know, if they even work on a next-next gen. Given the real long live cycle of the PS3, I would guess not just yet, and these two years might pass until they might even look into it. In two years from now, there might be complete new tech available.

BTW: The funny part is the description how the next-next (Nintendo?) gen might not use "Wii-like motion controllers", but a camera. Right. But then you need to bundle that with a TV which has a build in camera. (Eye[Toy] anyone ?).

For Sony and a next gen PS4 it would make sense to keep BC this time. Emulation is not an option, IMO. So, it would well make sense to base the next gen on current tech, but scale this well. RSX could easily be replace (but needs BC comp shaders ???), and IBM could come up with a new chip as well. Intel is not alone here. I could imagine, though, that the next XBox uses a next gen Core Duo (or what) and Intels vector processors. Nobody knows what Nintendo will do. They always use weird designs anyway...(And Wii/GC could be emulated by those new HW - easier then 360 or/and PS3).

the gen formerly known as next gen

the gen formerly know as next gen

I agree. For next-next gen it better be way way faster then what we know now. I mean, Rambus presented a TB memory bandwidth project - within the live cycle of those machines. Now, these guys just need a CPU which can handle that. Well, for a super cell, that means the EIB could hook up directly to the XDR (no SRAM any more ?) and you could easily scale the number of SPUs. Latencies would be interesting, too, to even save 2nd and 1st (?) level caches.