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snowdog on 05 December 2011
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Great thread but thought I'd make 1 correction, 1 suggestion and also give you all a little more background on the Power7 if I may..?

Firstly it's highly unlikely for the system RAM to be XDR2 as despite Rambus designing it 5 or 6 years ago none of the memory manufacturers have given it the time of day for some reason. No idea why though. GDDR3 is more likely imo (see below).

I'd also like to suggest that GDDR5 is unlikely for the GPU VRAM as it'll be too much of a nightmare to keep cool so I'd say that, again, GDDR3 is a more likely choice.

As for the Power7 there are developer leaks on Gaf that suggest that the Power7-based CPU will have 3 cores with developers only having access to 2...but if Nintendo and IBM have decided to do that there are some beneficial trade-offs that will arise from that. Only having 3 cores would mean that they can up the clockspeed as well as increase the eDRAM. A quad core with 16Mb of eDRAM would realistically be clocked under 3.0GHz but having an extra core disabled (all Power7 CPUs have 8 cores with the lower end CPUs having some of them disabled) could indeed mean we could end up with a CPU clocked at more than 3GHz and maybe as much as 24 or 32Mb of eDRAM which would mean it'll fly like poo off a shovel!!!

The Power7 family of processors is currently the most powerful family of processors on the planet so we don't have to worry about the power of the thing. It's going to be heavily modified to suit gaming application rather than server and AI application but given the amount of processing power behind it we'll probably see the PS4 and 720 being powered by one too.