Might this be what started that 16GB of RAM Rumor?

[OdinHades]

Sirius87 said:

OdinHades said:

walsufnir said:
The flash there is still a mystery to me and its purpose is unknows to almost all, aside from speculations. It could serve for the (crappy) BD-Live or something... But then emmc 4.5 would be overkill. It could also be used for pausing/resuming bluray-playback, bookmarks on blurays and all this things but I think until launch we will know!

It's most likely to store the Firmware/operating system or at least some important stuff of it. It was handled the same way on PS3 and 360. The consoles would be a lot slower if everything of the firmware was stored on a hard drive.

Possible.

But 8 GB is quite large. I would understand it if the Xbox One had a swappable HDD, but as it is a see no real reason to store such a large part of the OS on flash.

At the moment I would guess that the 8GB are used to copy the entire RAM to it when the console goes into standby (this doesn't have to be instantaneous, but can take some minutes in the background).

I think they just went with 8 GB to future proof the console. No need to copy the RAM as long as the system is in stand-by. The RAM doesn't need much power to keep whatever is saved atm. It works that way on laptops too.