Seems like Sony gave MS a big heads up on their console by dropping the 8GB GDDR5 RAM thing. Dollars to donughts that MS will now be under pressure to match and they have time now to react.

Sony should've kept that quiet until E3 or even afterwards to the point where MS couldn't have possibly changed their spec.

I'm not sure exactly how the RAM is attached to the chip or board, but I'm assuming that the MS720 will already have their boards made and if they've already set it up to allow DDR3, I doubt they'd be able to just change the memory to DDR5.

AFIAK the 720 is not in production yet. Probably won't be for a few more months.

Why? There is something that most people seem to forget, right now there aren't on the market 4 Gb GDDR5 chips, so Sony will have to use 16 chips of a new type of chip and package on package, which isn't cheap at all, and could provide some yields problems. MS seems to have taken a cheaper route, mass market memory with the embedded memory on chip, a much cheaper solution.

The Sony solution has more grunt, but it smells PS3 all over again on the cost department.

Design for both consoles was fixed a LONG time ago. Two years or more. It isn't something that can be swapped out, validated, and put into mass production in six months.

Secondly, when has a single spec ever decided the fate of a console?

I think it's funny how many people dismissed the idea of having 8GB RAM on a console. And now, bang, both next gen consoles have 8GB just like Epic, Crytek and DICE were asking for.

It's nothing like it.

If Sony had made PS3 with this Philosophy, They would have had much less problems with bad Third-Party ports this gen.

designs are likely locked at this point.
thing is, even if they did change, games currently in dev are being made with lower specs, and cant be easily changed. This means the dirst year at least would be much less than later games, while sony games will be using ddr5 specs at release.

That's assuming the leaks are accurate, which wasn't the case with the PS4, right?

I'm talking $$$