Will the next generation really make a difference regarding CPU requirements, though?
I've seen this idea vented out a lot. I decided to check if something like this happened in the 6th to 7th generation jump. The CPU jump was even larger than the one we'll get next year with the new consoles. So I looked at the minimum and recommended CPUs for games released between 2004 and 2010.
The result was... surprisingly linear? Most games ran just fine in one or two threads all the way to 2009 or 2010 (and won't even run in more than two threads really). That's between 3 to 5 years after the release of the PS3/X360. It was only the beginning of this decade that quad cores started to appear as the recommended spec. The gap is large enough to sever any causal link between the 7th generation consoles and CPU specs.
In fact, it seems RAM requirements grew the fastest on PC during the PS3/X360 era, exactly where the two consoles were somewhat poor.
