IBM's Power A2 is a 16 core chip. It's actually pretty small and low wattage.

It's not a beast of a CPU like you'd think given the number of cores.

Why are so many people taking the ATI HD6000 series rumor as a fact, when there is an equal amout of HD7000 rumors right now.

If they going system on a chip approach, then not only do the cores act for the CPU, but wil be doing everything.  They had integrated memory.  Now they have integrated processing power.  This power would be used for everything involved and can be divided up as developers choose.  In doing this, Microsoft lays down a foundation for the future of their system.  The eat a decent loss per sale of console, and get it clocking in at $400.  Backwards compatibility will end up being there also, with their ability to upgrade current games as far as graphics go.  So the power would fuel Kinect and so on.  $400 gets you a system without Kinect with it (if you have Kinect, then you just hook it up to your next gen XBox).

It would be doable, and a large investment.  Still want to see what the full spec list will be.

Maybe they are driving it.  Like, in the past, it was said that Epic had Microsoft double the planned amount of memory in the system, in order to make Gears look better, which upped the costs around $1 billion:

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/xbox-720-ps4-must-show-dramatic-leap-from-current-gen-says-epic/

Sweeney pointed out again that Epic is always eager to talk with platform holders to ensure that hardware is advanced enough to enable big leaps in quality. With the Xbox 360, for example, Epic persuaded Microsoft to up the RAM from 256MB to 512MB, and while that cost Microsoft about $1 billion more, it also enabled Gears of War games to look far more detailed.

If this rumour is true, Epic actually SAVED XB360: with just 256MB unified memory, considering the console's main audience, the greater importance for it than for competitors of PC/console multiplats and 3rd party devs, less efficient in the use of HW resources than 1st parties, probably by now XB360 would have been dying with lower nsales than the current ones and unable to recover the initial costs, despite them being lower. Anyway I seriously doubt those 256MB more cost $1B, most probably around half of that sum.

It could be the A2 but it makes no sense. The problem with so many cores is the programming. And you cant infinetly parallelize every task. So 16 weak cores are actually suckier to programm then 4 strong ones. And have no benefits I can think of.

If MS really wants 16 cores its possible that its going to be strong cores because if its weak ones they would be better of with 4 Core CPUs

But I think its an 8 core Power 7 with HT if the rumor is true. That would be like 16 current 360 cores with 2 Threads each.

Power7 and Core A2 are both 4 way multithreaded.   So the 8 core Power7 would have 32 threads and the 16 core Power A2 would have 64 threads.

I only mentioned Power A2 because it is already a 16 core CPU.  No other usable 16 core CPU's exist or are in immediate development in time for use.

If they are calculating core count by adding the number of actual cores and logic cores (threads) then it core either be an 8 core AMD CPU (2 threads per core) or a 4 core IBM CPU (4 threads per core).

Listening to your develpers, rather than bean counters, is what matters most.  I believe the decision to go more memory meant releasing an XBox ssystem without a hard drive to keep down costs.  In the end, it was the right one, considering what the PS3 came in at.

Interesting analogy, but by that definition, even the little 10NES lockout chips in the NES cartridges can be considered cores. How about RSA one-time key generators? What about pipelines that include two integer processing elements? Should they each be considered cores, even though they're slaves to the pipelined stage?

There was a time when the definition of 'core' was not hijacked and used for purposes of making a manufacturer's CPU look better (like Intel's ridiculous NetBurst microarchitecture, used purely to soup up GHz and nothing more, as well as AMDs marketing ploy of basing their processor ratings "In comparison to Pentium 4" with the n+ range).

The way that the Cell is seen is essentially a slight step up from Intel's Hyperthreading, in which main occuring execution resources are duplicated and left to the internal task scheduler to assign them (respectively the SPEs and PPEs of the core). The more unused resources are left to the singular resource (if you notice, the PPE is the only element that handles the entire PowerPC instruction set).

So tell me, why can each SPE be classed as a core under this analogy, yet Intel's Hyperthreading cannot?

Most probably Sony hoped to be able to launch PS3 one year later. MS move of early launching XB360 to escape from the one-sided deal with NVidia for XFlop GPU initially damaged MS itself a lot, due to the unreliability of the first rushed XB360s, but ended up damaging Sony more. Format war between BD and HD-DVD damaged it further, creating shortages of blue lasers and keeping their price high longer. IMVHO these things put together damaged Sony more than excessive feature richness in general. Kudos to MS, anyway, for overturny a negative situation so deftly. About RAM, avoiding keeping it too small is the most cost effective feature for almost every computing system, yes, 1st party devs can be fine developing exclusives with little RAM available, but 3rd parties can't optimize or even be forced to do major rewritings of their multiplats for every system. At XB1 times the unexpected redution of RAM from the originally planned 128MB to just 64MB, due to the last big RAM crisis, forced PC/XB1 multiplat devs to cripple many games, as they weren't given enough time to rewrite them properly, and even if they had time, costs would have skyrocketed. And so, for example, Thief III levels, that in the older chapters could be huge, had to be split in smaller sections, and Garrett wasn't able to swim anymore. Morrowind had a slightly better destiny, because it used dynamic loading, but it wasn't enough, they were forced to separate indoor and outdoor, the former are separated levels, the latter is a huge single level, but loaded dynamically, and on PC you can increase the visibility distance, but the interactivity one remains shorter, increasing the former you can spot enemies far away, but they stand still and you cannot hit them even using long range attacks until they get closer, at that point they suddenly start moving. Gothic, PC exclusive of roughly the same period, if you have enough RAM can do a lot better even with modest CPU and GPU, while Morrowind, with the same HW, uses it less efficiently, it has limits that cannot be bypassed even if you have enough HW resources.
To cut it short, I really hope next gen console producers not be avaricious with main RAM, if they need to save money they should try to cut anything else, but NOT main RAM!