This is more like I expected, and I hope it is closer to the truth. The first rumors seemed embarrassingly underpowered. Imagine what will be around in 2016 and I don't want My Xbox Whatever to be ridiculously behind.

Plus, remember there will be two boxes. A casual one, and a more expensive gamer one. I have a feeling it will be expensive, but the original Atari 2600 would be like $800 or something in today's dollars.

I still doubt Sony will go in for the most advanced system. That system hasn't been the most popular, and it didn't give them the success they expected this gen. (N64 most powerful it's gen, SP1 sold more, Xbox most powerful last gen, PS2 sold way more.) I think they will be focusing on games - easier for a business to adjust than hardware.

I think Kinect 2.0 will need more processing, as will the better graphics and artificial intelligence. Plus it might be running DirectX 11.1 or hopefully even 12. Till it looks as good as the Movie Avatar, I will still be wanting more. (And will probably after that milestone is reached too. - yes, would like a holodeck).

Plus, they make money off Xlive, I hope they don't mind subsidizing a bit.

A decent gaming rig from 2012 will probably be slightly more powerful than any of the next gen consoles. Also, the number of cores doesn't directly affect the ability to run games, not on its own, it would make little sense to throw in a hugely impressive cpu teamed with a mediocre gpu (which both the PS4 and 720 will likely get) and small amounts of ram (2-3GB).

This whole thing reeks of "teh C3ll" all over again. I'll hold off until E3, where all three machines will likely be detailed and specs revealed (Sony and/or MS denying a showing at E3 means nothing, this is the oldest trick in the book).

This? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2

It looks specialized for different purposes than gaming, at least currently, but yes, I guess it proves your point.

How we all settle for a 8 core processor instead so MS can have no excuse to not include a decent GPU and 4GB-6GB RAM?

In all seriousness, a good 7 or 8 core processor should provide well enough for a fair amount of years yet.

They could also use a variant of this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_e6500

but that is less likely

Yes. IMVHO, a POWER7 is still the most likely choice, given the POWER descent that directly ties it to Cell and Xenon, IBM's involvement and the more general purpose design, with many specialized versions already available too off-the-shelf.

Millenium said: How we all settle for a 8 core processor instead so MS can have no excuse to not include a decent GPU and 4GB-6GB RAM? In all seriousness, a good 7 or 8 core processor should provide well enough for a fair amount of years yet.

Precisely. I'd much rather have a good gpu and 4GB RAM. But I do think both the PS4 and the 720 will have only 2GB RAM, unfortunately.

Agreed that it is less likely given that the chip is targeting networking and telecommunications services.  

So is the A2, tho that is meant to be more dual purpose. Naturally they wouldn't use ether architecture straight up as they are both designed for very different work loads. Whatever they use will have to be modified, even Power 7 would be cut down for console use as it has execution units designed to optomise money transactions which would be no use in a console for example. 

Which is probably why Sony has aparently gone with an "off the shelf" x86 chip.

Yes, but they're not going to make two boxes with different game-playing capabilities, that would be suicidal, or they would have to be counted as different consoles flat out.

I still stand by the idea that they're not going to overshoot too far this time, like they overshot last time