According to analsyst cosoles will die out between 5 to 10 year time.

[NJ5]

I think some of you who are posting in this thread didn't notice the following quote:

"In fact in 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be “virtualized” as web services by your content provider.”

Then he goes on to talk about cloud computing. What he's saying is that the functions of the CPU and GPU will be done by "the cloud" (i.e. a mashup of processors scattered in the internet which are connected to a distributed computing network).

The problem with this is that interactive gaming requires full-duplex interaction, it's not just a server pushing a stream of images as in youtube. Forget frame-by-frame interactivity, welcome to a world where each frame of a game was computed (at least) tens of miliseconds ago by a collection of CPUs around the world.

I don't know if I'm being explicit enough, but I think at least some of you can see the problems of such an approach. It's the Network Computer fad all over again, and many of the problems of thin clients rolled into a single analyst's wet dream.