It's always funny reading of stuff like superfast SSD with some terabytes.
Ther was that 'next year we'll have a quantum computer' or ther'll be terabyte optical discs years ago.
And no, there's no need for terabytes of RAM as long as the hardware isn't powerful enough to simulate pretty much evereything from sandparticles to real water drops. Until now, thats just shiny shader fx. We don't even have softbody physics on consoles.
Nope, between 32 and 64GB RAM at best. But loads of storage space, probably still HDD's as long as they're cheaper.
I'd guess 32GB RAM, because console OS's won't get much fatter. One thing many forget, 360 OS in background was about 32MB, now we have 1GB on Wii U and about 3GB on PS4One just for multitasking shareplay etc.
Actual free and usable RAM right now is just around 5GB, last gen had almost 0,5GB.
RAM will get much faster though with new stacked 3D RAM.
HDD's just because of the price as long as they're cheaper. Possibly as much terabytes as possible to get people download only. SSD's will only come if they get much, much cheaper as mass storage.
CPU will again be low clock manycore but handing over more and more work to the GPU.
As of now with decreasing speed of raw power growth i would expect next gen GPU's to be somewhere between 8 and 16 TFLOP/s. Again, the power consumption will be an issue. Most people don't want consoles with the size of AVR's or minitower PC's. Plain fact, right now everyones moaning about Xbones size.
Nintendo again might show up a little earlier with a little slower hardware. Though that wont be a big difference anymore.
That's a strange thing. Cell is powerful in some terms, yes. Give it an ideal workload and it is fast. That's like doing pretty much of the same physics stuff.
Give it other workload and having no data prefetch, being in order architecture, the G5 core moderating the SPE's and so on will make Cell a pain in the ass.
And the stuff Cell was intended to do is already done on GPU's or will be done on GPU's soon. Just don't make the mistake, only look at the ideal cases like Ubis physics demo and say Cell's faster. Because there's much more in an actual game that slows down Cell extremely.
