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haxxiy said:

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.

I do think that CPUs req. will increase. The jump from last to this one didn't made it clear as the Jaguar cores of the consoles aren't really powerful, but I believe next gen consoles will go with Zen cores, and they'll probably go with 8 cores as well (tho not all of them may end being used for games).

Also, there have been a lot of games this gen that have begun to take advantage of more cores, sometimes even needing more than a quad core to run stable and without hitting 100% load.

Because of that, I think that we may find that, two or three years after the launch of the new consoles, we'll need at least a 6-core/12-thread or even higher CPU.