Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, a trade show dedicated to the game industry, chief technical officer for Sony, Shin'ichi Okamoto said that Sony's intentions for the next generation PlayStation console aim at 1000 times the processing power of the PS2.
According to Shin'ichi Okamoto such a goal would be unrealistic based on "Moore's Law". Moore's law suggests that semiconductor power doubles, approximately, every 18 months.
"We can't wait 20 years" he said and went on to suggest that the way forward will be the use of distributed computing.
Distributed computing is the use of many networked computers in order to spread computational tasks. The particular variation of distributed computing which has Sony interested is IBM's Big Blue research in "Grid Computing". It is extremely unlikely that any details will be released any time soon but the principle would involve networked consoles sharing data and processing power.
Okamoto also said that the Linux kit released for the PS2 is the basis of much of the research that has been carried out so far.
Just to prove that Sony also plan ahead, way ahead, he added "maybe the PlayStation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology."