Nintendo 64 > Vega 64

If they'd actually need any amount of RAM beyond 16GB they would have to come with SSDs which I highly doubt. 16GB for a console in 2021 is absolutely fine and will certainly not be a bottleneck. 16GB or 32GB is not going to make a difference.

Yes to all You wrote. SSD for games of over 100GB size is expensive. Load times are a factor, and HDD is slow. And yes 16GB is ok for a console. But if 1080p games need 8GB, then 4k games might need 16GB of ram. But that’s only for games with the same amount of assets, same size of landscape, same amount of objects in the environment. With only the texture resolution higher. The next gen needs more then just 4k. Hope for 64GB… and a price below 699;)  

(640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone)

It actually doesn't though.
Besides... When the Playstation 4 launched we only had Graphics Graphics Core Next 2. There wasn't a massive feature set divide at an architectural level. (The Playstation 4 adopted some improvements anyway.)

Vega is a 2017 part.
2018 we get Navi.
2019 we get something else.
2020 when I expect next gen consoles to drop... We should have something else again.

Ryzen 1700 ain't happening.
People expecting Ryzen with the Xbox One X. The Xbox One X was timed right, it had a higher price, there were potential "hints" like Microsft showcasing Xbox next to Ryzen... And I was right then that Ryzen wasn't happening. And I doubt it will happen next gen either.

Hardware itself doesn't dramatically change in manufacturing costs.

In a few years, AMD will have more efficient, faster and cheaper hardware at various price points than Vega.

By 2020, I would be hoping to be staring down the barrel of Direct X 13 with hardware feature sets to match.

We already know that Graphics Core Next falls short in the efficiency stakes as well, Vega does try and make amends in that aspect, but it's still not going to be beating nVidia... Let alone hardware in 2020.

Well. Depending on binning they could retain higher clock rates than that and still result in less power consumption.

For example... Take the Fury X. AMD took that 275w GPU @ 1050Mhz, dropped the clocks by a only 50mhz and managed to shave 100w off the power consumption at 175w.

In-fact, the Nano was not only faster than the base Fury, but used less power than that as well... And they were the same chips. - Base fury even had parts of the chip disabled.

AMD took only the best chips that would operate at a high clockrate with low voltages.
Of course, that does increase costs as well.

But these are all high-end parts. Consoles can't afford to have high-end parts.

Agreed. Navi or newer makes far more sense.

SSD Caching might be a thing/Hybrid Drive. Use a mechanical drive for sheer storage capacity, SSD caching to bolster performance.
Hopefully they use faster optical drives, install times are so painful on consoles, it's retarded.

16GB would seem pretty inadequate next-gen in my eyes.  It's only a 30% increase over Scorpio, I would not be surprised if we see 24-32GB of total Ram next gen.

Need to remember that System Memory and Graphics Memory is shared in console land.
On the PC, 6-8GB GPU's are becoming the norm today in the mid-range with 16GB system memory backing that up.
In a few years time I would expect GPU's to trend towards 12-16GB in the mid-range.

My bold prediction is coming truer and truer. Nvidia will be the gpu in the next consoles.

Sony and Microsoft will be forced to use Nvidia in next-gen consoles because Amd gpus is just so bad compared to Nvidia.

This vega gpu needed 50% more die size(50%+ more transistors), a watercooler, hbm2 and almost twice the power (watt usage) to barely beat the geforce 1080. Expect the watercooler version have about 0-5% more performance then geforce 1080 and the non water cooler version to lose.

This card is hilariously bad, it's worse than polaris architecture (the gpu in ps4 pro and xbox one x). I don't know how AMD manage to make a card worse than their previously.

I still stand by this. Ps5 will have 4-6 ryzen cpu cores, a midrange nvidia gpu(whatever arhitecture comes after volta), 16gb gddr6 and 2 tb non-ssd drive. 2020 released time(will be using 7 nm Euv) 399$ and non backwards compatibility.

If Sony go amd gpu expect instead 2019 release date(will be using 7 nm non-Euv), 8 ryzen cpu cores, 8-9 teraflops navi gpu(might be polaris architecture if Navi is a disaster as Vega) but will be backwards compatibility.

so should we expect these GPU'd for next gen consoles?

The current consoles are using mobile AMD APUs. Why would you think that console makers won't use bad GPUs? That's their MO.

AMD and NVidia in one console? Means problems with optimization. Smaller prize cuts then with all AMD products. Different architectures and hardware philosophes. PS5 Will be all AMD with low to middle range chips. Or NVidia GPU and 16 core ARM CPU ?

No. Most likely 2 generations after this one. So midrange of what ever comes after Navi.

damn, that would be an impressive jump in hardware. so we are looking at at least 13-14 teraflops for next gen?