Couldn't agree more mate. A great deal of people are understimating how powerful the U is going to be when it's released. Going by what we've had confirmed by IBM and AMD the U will be 4 or 5 times more powerful than the PS3 and 360. This gen has confused a great deal of people thanks to the 360 being the only console out of the three to have a tradional leap in power (the 360 is around 5 times more powerful than the Xbox). The PS3 was a nontraditional 10 times more powerful than the PS2 and the Wii was a nontraditional 1.5-2 times more powerful than the Gamecube.

For some strange reason a great deal of people are expecting the difference in power between the U and the PS4/720 to be on a par with the difference in power between the Wii and PS3/360. It's either people new to gaming this gen or people with very short memories. All 3 consoles next gen should be in the same sort of ballpark in terms of power as they were last gen - neither Sony nor Microsoft will want to repeat Sony's cock up this gen with the PS3...they'll both want to keep production and retail costs down.

Next gen will have 8GB RAM for sure as it's already dirty cheap. 8GB RAM only costs $50 and by 2013 it will probably cost less than half of that.

Video memory is harder to predict. Hopefully it will be 4GB but it's possible they choose only 2GB.

I am not saying you are wrong but I would be very surprise if you turn out to be right. RAM may be cheap but it seems scrapping the barrel in terms of saving every possible penny on production is the way of things...notable exception PS3 but we all know how that turned out initially.

Before x360 and PS3 I remember a few people saying RAM was cheap (then as well) and both systems should have more but that never happened.

I find (and this is not based on any formula just observation) that the highest end consoles come with half the total RAM that is recommended for the most graphically intense PC games around the time of launch.

In 2006 the recommended spec for the top Games like Crysis was 1GB RAM (256 Graphics RAM).PS3 and X360 came with 512 total.

Right now the sweet spot for PC is gaming 4GB (1GB Graphics RAM) as recommended for games like Metro2033, Battlefield 3 etc.

Even if the PC gaming specs jump to 8GB by the time of PS4 and Xbox NEXT, I would predict the max on these next gen consoles would be 4GB shared, maybe even less.

No, the  year before x360 was released RAM was actually expensive. I remember even in Spring of 2006 that I payed 100$ for only 512MB. For that $100 you get 16GB today  - 32 times as much RAM as you got 5.5 years ago!

Also your example with Crysis is wrong since it was released way after both X360 and PS3 in Fall 2007.

For comparable games and sweet spot recommendations on PC at the time of PS360 release you have to look at games like Doom 3, Battlefield 2 and HalfLife 2 where the recommendation was only 512MB RAM and 128-256MB video-RAM. In 2013-14 we will for sure have a few games that demand 8GB RAM and 2GB video-RAM for the highest settings (and some will make use of 4GB video-RAM).

The question is how much would games that uses that much memory will cost?

Your experience of RAM prices in 2006/2007 somewhat differs to mine but without any solid evidence to back me up I will have to leave it at that. Yeah it is cheaper now. I suppose it's all relative.

I remember outfitting my office with a few PCs then and was shocked at how cheap the RAM was.

The specs for a game are usually released long before the game itself. In June 2006 Crysis PC specs were released so don't make too much of the games release date.

Your third paragraph kinda back up my point. If those games mentioned only wanted 512MB RAM on the PC (which uses up far more resources by the nature of it's OS than a console) it only stands to reason that 512 would be more than enough for this gens console in it's lifetime. PS3 went 256MB main and 256 VRAM. X360 512MB shared but usually probably works out the same most times.

I'll stick with 4GB (total) or less for the nextgen Sony and or MS consoles if released in 2013.

Once again i am not saying you are wrong but let's see who is right.

Just on a side note about memory prices and consoles ...

One of the reasons consoles (generally) have far less memory than their PC counterparts is that console manufacturers tend to favour higher quality memory over higher quantities of memory. As a result of this, it makes more sense to look at the price of DDR 3 in the 2000+ range than it does to look at the price of DDR 2 memory in the 1000 range.

While Nintendo might not choose to use DDR memory at all, it is likely that the memory they will choose will be fairly high end and similar in cost to high end DDR memory. The reason for this is that memory access is very costly, and in high performance systems memory tends to act as a bottleneck. Often real world performance can be dramatically increased in a system without increasing theoritical processing power of the CPU/GPU simply by using much faster memory.

Quite right. And it should be mentioned that whilst your bog standard PC RAM is cheap you won't find it going anywhere near a console. Console RAM isn't on a stick lol, it's embedded onto a chip so is a great deal more expensive.

It should also be noted that you probably won't even find as much as 2Gb of total RAM on a console next gen - we'll probably see 1Gb of VRAM for the GPU and 512Mb of system RAM. Any more than 512Mb of system RAM is overkill due to console operating systems having such a small footprint. Developers may want 4Gb or 8Gb of RAM but there's no way that's going to happen next gen unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a console.

its not the statement but you

]i am just pointing how the electronics industry is coming together with HW and SW with ecosystems  battling it out