My estimated specs of the PlayStation 5

[freedquaker]

Turkish said:

...
56-64GB RAM 16x4 GiB GDDR6 memory chips (set to be introduced within 2-3 years, GDDR5 was introduced in 2008)

4K gaming will be possible, but QHD (2560x1440)/WQXGA+ (3200x1800) 16:9 resolutions will also be common in individual cases depending on the Virtual Reality support and if 4K proves too taxing. VR games will be 1440 or 1800p, 90-120fps.

~12GB RAM will be reserved for the OS, the footprint will decrease gradually over time.

Release: November 2019,......

I think this as a joke or only a half serious thread, there is too many issues. The most obvious one is the amount of RAM.

Yes the memory has increased exponentially in the past, but it was because relatively scarce and the applications needed it. The last Windows OS that was more memory demanding than its predecessor was Windows Vista. Both Windows 7 and 8 are more light-weight than their predecessors, which means if you can have sufficient RAM for Windows Vista (released in 2006), then you have sufficient RAM for Windows 8.1 (released in 2014). Likewise the average RAM increases have come to a crawl in the recent years, mainly because

a) Slowdown in the mainstream technological progress

b) Shifts to mobile devices (which have been catching up)

c) Differentiation between desktops (lots of ram) and laptops (sufficient ram)

d) Sufficiency in current level

e) Emphasis on power and use efficiency (same resources can do more)

 

Below are the average (System) RAM during each generation compared with the playstation of the era

1995: Gen5 : PC : 16 MB, PS1 : 2 MB
2000: Gen6 : PC : 128 MB, PS2 : 32 MB
2005: Gen7 : PC : 1 GB, PS3 : 256 MB
2013: Gen8 : PC : 4+2 GB, PS : 8 GB (Including graphics)
2020: estim : PC : 16-24 GB, PS : 16-24 GB (Including graphics)

There is an obvious and significant slowdown in the progression of RAM, and the next generation of consoles will not have the same kind of leap in memory specs, as it is simply unnecessary. If those consoles were to be released around 2020, then the RAM will roughly double or triple, increasing way less than before.

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Your other points about number of cores atc are entirely off the mark. It is quite easy to utilize dual cores in a multi-tasking environment, without specific coding (just run two demanding programs at the same time on a multi-core aware OS). But things get very complicated with more than 2 cores, with SEVERELY DIMINISHING RETURNS.

It took almost a decade between the widespread use dual cores and quad cores, which are only implemented in games and very specific and cpu demanding programs. CPU parallelism is SO UNLIKE GPU parallelism, since the CPU is not just a dump peasent. It is easy to have thousands of mindless soldiers but you cannot have too many officers in the army!

The CPUs today have already 8 cores, and I predict the same trend to continue (4-8 cores) but there may be other co-processors for multiple reasons (arm processors, audio processors etc). But what definitely will happen is

- Single Core performance will definitely improve

- Parallelization techniques, software, and layers will tremendously improve

- GPGPU and similar techniques harvesting the mindless GPU compute will significantly improve

- More efficient CPU-GPU-Memory designs (like those introduced by AMD recently) will be available

- RAM will be faster

- Enhancements in the Physics, AI scripting as well as cloud utilization...

etc...

 

On the GPU side, we still have lots of room to improve, probably the performance increasing exponentially, not only because of raw performance gains, but also because of

- experiences from the mobile, more compact and efficient in a smaller die, or better performance in the same die

- more efficient and smaller processing nodes

- better integration with the system and CPU

- better harnessing the GPGPU computes

- better techniques with Direct X 12, Mantle, Open GL 4etc

- further blend of ray tracing

- etc...

 

Basically the next generation will be a gradual shift of today.