As reported by Fudzilla, industry insiders have confirmed that the release of next generation consoles will begin in the year 2012. Due to the current economic conditions, both Sony and Microsoft have made the decision to delay the release of new hardware by at least two years.
"Games still look good on both Playstation and Xbox, but Wii could definitely use some sort of facelift, especially when it comes to graphics. ATI and Nvidia will fight for the GPU dominance while IBM has a good chance to win the CPU deal. If Intel ever makes [Larrabee] work, it will also try to go after the console GPU design but we are very confident that they have very little chance for success. Maybe they will team up with someone and make their own console, it would not surprise us."
In contrast to these rumors, however, Michael Pachter, gaming research analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, has stated that the next generation of consoles will not arrive before 2013, if at all.
Thank you to Neowin member Ci7 for the news tip.