Why PS4 won't be cutting edge, and neither will Xbox3 - or Why Nintendo might win next gen

[JEMC]

Squilliam said:

JEMC said:

Squilliam said:
Actually I would put the Wii U at a 6, PS3 at a 5.5 and Xbox 360 as a 5 and the XB3 as a 35 and PS4 as a 32.

Do you really believe that the nest consoles will be 6x/7x more powerful than the PS3/Xbox360?

Why wouldn't they be? The Xbox 360 only has 430M transistors CGPU + 100M transistors ED-RAM. On 28nm you can pack in a lot of transistors, ~1.4B per 100mm^2. There have been very strong rumours for 5GB of RAM available to games for the Xbox 3, 3GB for OS, they make sense given the availability of DDR4 next year and advanced chip stacking techniques which yield incredibly high bandwidth.

Edit: A lot can change in 8 years. The Xbox 360 is ancient by comparison now, they won't have to release a 200W console to be 8x more powerful, they could do it with 120W. If they release a 200W console again it'll be more like 12x more powerful but I think that is unlikely.

The main thing preventing that is cost. Sure, they could launch a console with 12x the power, but the cost for that would be too big to make it a viable option. And 8 times more powerful but using only 120W. At what speeds would the CPU and GPU need to operate to get the consumption that low? Wouldn't it be counterproductive?

Side note: Do you think that DDR4 will be used? If, as you say, they make it available in 2013 then it will be much more expensive than DDR3. Maybe even more expensive than GDDR5. And while the bandwidth sees a very high increment, so is the latency that almost doubles going from CAS7 to CAS13.