Don't know what anyone else thinks... But the PS3 and Xbox 360's texture quality is appalling, Hopefully developers won't reduce a games resolutions to a pitiful 720P or lower resolution with hardly any Anti-Aliasing just so they can meet acceptable performance this time around.
I'm a PC gamer. I run my games at a 5760x1080 resolution with 8x AA, regardless of the Xbox or Playstation game in question... They all look incredibly bad in comparison.
As for the CPU, I hope Microsoft sticks with the PowerPC architecture again for multiple reasons...
For instance, the chips are cheap to manufacture, Microsoft isn't going to do the same mistake as they did with the first Xbox and rely on another company (Intel) to make the chips which ends up much more expensive, so that will count out AMD or Intel supplying chips, Microsoft is a company after-all and thus will look after their bottom line.
Secondly... If Microsoft sticks to PowerPC and maintains the same instructions sets... Backwards compatibility with the Xbox 360 will be simple to obtain, you won't need software emulation or extra processing chips.
However... To improve the Performance of the Xbox and PS3's fairly lack-lusture CPU performance, they will need to do some architectural improvements like moving to an Out-Of-Order (OOO) Execution pipeline, larger caches and general IPC improvements as well as throwing a couple more cores into the mix.
As for Graphics... AMD is a natural choice, especially with the pricing-drama's Microsoft had with the first Xbox and nVidia.
With the Xbox 360 Microsoft bought the design from AMD/ATI, albeit a modified GPU so they could manufacture it themselves, so it's a natural path for Microsoft to go down again.
Hopefully it's a modern GPU architecture, equipped with Tessellation and other techniques. (You console guys don't know what your missing.)
As for Dual-GPU's... It won't happen. Why?
Well. Cost. Equipping two high-end GPU's costs more than a couple of Xbox 360's combined, the yields on such
chips are low, consume a ton of power and throw out allot of heat.
I'm running twin Radeon 6950 2gb cards unlocked into 6970's which eat about 400w+ of power. That's about twice the amount of power than the first Xbox 360 revision. (Y'know, the one with all the failures?)
And that's just my graphics cards, a single GPU. Sure. The consoles are only running 1080P at most remember.
Secondly... Running Dual-GPU configurations adds an effect known as "Micro-stuttering".
This is something that AMD or nVidia have not been capable of eliminating completely.
You can see it in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPNrT0AGjfE
Basically it looks like low-framerates, despite the framerates being in excess of 60fps in some cases.
I'm personally looking at the next-generation consoles with allot of hope. Hope that when launched the more "lazy" developers will need to kick their games up a notch graphically, which will benefit my platform of choice. The PC. - The console ports will actually be a little more bearable for awhile. That is until another couple of years pass by.
Anyhow. That's my 2 cents.
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