Will microsoft still have the best 3rd party games version knowing that Sony and Nintendo together move more consoles globally than Microsoft? Do you think Microsoft will be able to sustain that kind of damage knowing that they have just a few 1st party titles? Microsoft has put itself in that spot, it was just about time Nintendo and Sony realize that. My theory says, they are working together to see what happen with Microsoft. And remember, Bill Gates was just happy that he could have a share on the industry, but not because they wanted to deliver a new console experience, reason why they don't have many exclusives."

Source: cbarroso09

Roma said: GPGPUs are the future of GPUs so all next gen consoles will use it or at least I think it is the future

nah, not the future, it's the present

MS and Sony simply can't pick up an AMD GPU that doesn't feature GPGPU capabilities at this point

The ability to run non-graphics code on a GPU. It's been around for over five years on the desktop, all current graphics cards have it, and has made no great impact on gaming. It isn't necessarily more power or cost efficient and getting code to run well on a GPU is very, very hard because of low memory bandwidth/sharing and requiring many threads. Much worse than adjusting to Cell and unlike Cell there's little reason to do so.

I don't expect it to ever be essential to a next-gen video game on any platform. The most I expect is some visual-effect-only debris physics.

I really doubt that Sony and Microsoft scrapped all their plans and millions spent on development to quickly emulate the Wii U--even if it were possible to do that with games already in development.  If they end up going in this direction, which they almost certainly will, then it's simply because the industry as a whole is moving that way.