[The Godfather]

An x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry

The economic reasoning is that exotic architectures (read PPC) are a huge investment that Sony and MS are not willing to make in 2013.
And probably they can't find a CPU with the MIPS/$ that can beat x86 offerings.
AMD for the win? Most likely, as they can provide CPU+GPU solutions with little risk under a simple contract, avoiding engineering costs to Sony and MS.
Could this mean that a console could play games and run a PC OS?
Could they be entering a drier market, as the Apple TV has the potential of offering Angry birds and infinity blade, and taking away the cheapie gaming market?

PowerPCs only known market would remain the Nintendo Wii and perhaps Macintoshes XD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7vsZbSsOkU

[OreoCookie]

The article says that the next-gen XBox purportedly uses an AMD GPU coupled to a PowerPC CPU:

Originally Posted by arstechnica

Xbox 360's replacement, purported to be named "Durango", is also rumored to use an AMD GPU—either a Southern Islands variant or an equivalent to a Radeon HD 6670—this time paired with a PowerPC CPU.

[Waragainstsleep]

Actually the vast majority of Power and PowerPC based chips are embedded chips for a variety of purposes. Many many engine management systems used to run of chips closely related to the G3 for example.

[The Godfather]

"Used to". I don't know if newish designs are using ARM, since G3 performance is available in ARM CPUs in 2007.

Is it car engines, plane engines or train engines? ... it is car engines. I just found a 2001 article referring to that.

[mduell]

GE uses PowerPC on the big fans.

I think they used some Intel thing for the little fans, perhaps i960, until they finally ran out of stock a few years ago.

[Don Pickett]

PPC has been dead since the Intel/AMD megahertz wars. Once Motorola couldn't push the G4s past 500 MHz the end was all but determined. The G5 was a hail mary, one IBM was never really interested in and one it had no plans to develop past the initial release. It has become the processor family of choice for embedded systems--cars, routers, printers, etc.--where low power draw, low heat and relatively high performance win the day. But its days as a general purpose CPU are long over. Current x86 chips are much, much faster than any PPC chip this side of IBMs POWER server chips.

The new Amiga hardware, the X1000, uses a 1.8 GHz dual-core PA6T, which is almost as fast as x86 CPUs from 2004.

[Waragainstsleep]

PPC as a general purpose CPU was almost an afterthought. Made almost entirely for Apple's benefit. IBM tried to carry on for a while making some server chips and did some fairly impressive stuff with the technology, they supposedly had one clocked at 5 or 6 GHz in the lab so I heard but when a company like that doesn't use its own chips in favour of buying very expensive ones from Intel instead, it says a lot I guess.

Motorola/Freescale gave up computer CPUs after the G4 but as I mentioned they carried on for a while making the embedded processors that were the real mainstay of the PPC technology.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Motorola/Freescale gave up computer CPUs after the G4 but as I mentioned they carried on for a while making the embedded processors that were the real mainstay of the PPC technology.

Still do: PPC chips are widespread in cars, routers and in military applications. The F-35's various computers are powered by them.

[OreoCookie]

The next-gen XBox will use a 16-core PowerPC CPU. The PowerPC is dead, long live the PowerPC

[P]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett 

PPC has been dead since the Intel/AMD megahertz wars.

Only on the desktop. In the server space, the POWER CPUs have been very powerful, except for a stumble with the POWER6 fireball design (which still didn't do half bad). In embedded, as has been noted, they're very common.

Intel has worked well to reduce the penalty of the x86 ISA by deprecating the worst bit (x87 FPU instructions), extending it with better instruction sets, developing a very complex decoder system (macroops and microops fusion gradually spreading through the line, uop caching in Sandy Bridge), spending lots of time on branch prediction and caching and working on compilers, but their main advantage - the big library of programs available for x86 - is decreased as things like HTML5 become more important. Intel is almost completely reliant on its process advantage now. They're the best there, but even they can stumble - witness the 90nm debacle.