This week, the Inquirer published an exclusive report based on conversations with unnamed Sony representatives at CES, claiming that Nvidia would be entirely out of the picture in all upcoming next generation consoles. Overall, claims were made stating that Intel's forthcoming Larrabee would be the general purpose GPU to power Sony's PlayStation 4 in the next gen console war.

"The nice Sony engineering lady at CES told us that Intel essentially bought the win, a theoretically good architecture, no imminent threats of going bust, and not being hated by Sony all contributed too. With a couple of deliverables satisfied, the PS4 GPU belongs to Intel."  The report continued: "Yeah, Intel won the PS4 GPU, no shock considering how much they needed a console win to get people coding for Larrabee."

Fortunately, Sony Computer Entertainment has moved quickly to deny this latest rumor that Intel will be producing the GPU for the PlayStation 4. To further correct the given claims, TechRadar spoke with a Sony Computer Entertainment Europe representative who clearly stated, "it's nonsense, and is quite possibly the best work of fiction I've read, since Lord of the Rings."

On another note, the report even stated that the next gen consoles "will likely have a CPU which we know nothing about" and would "seem to be leaning towards x86," all while claiming this to be solid information.

All in all, we'll let the rumor mill have a swing at this one. The only speculation we are going to give at this point is the idea that Sony might very well choose to implement the OpenGL 3.0 specification in its next gen console for the new texture compression algorithms and full frame buffer object functionality, not to mention 32-bit floating-point textures. We hope some kind of general purpose GPU functionality will also be included, although we are left waiting in anticipation with the rest of the world for much more needed concrete evidence.