1 or 2? Well AMD had their Athlon 64 X2 dual core cpu out in May 2005. I remember I really wanted one although I just had an Athlon 64 at the time. On the Apple side, IBM released their dual core PowerPC G5 chip in October 2005. Prior to these "dual core" were just SMP systems, having 2 (or more) single core cpu's on one board working together.

In January 2006, Intel released their Core Duo dual core cpu. (which is also when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel cpu's)

I don't know what to believe. One one hand we have people saying how impossibly unlikely it is and on the other hand we have people saying they can see it happening.

doesn't make sense. Nothing stops a developer from porting a less demanding game on the nextbox if it does end up being more powerful than the other two. It just won't look as impressive compared to games not ported on the nextbox.  It's not like the ps3/360 vs wii where developers would have to completely redo the game for it to run on the wii. 

I got a 360 in December  2nd 2005. US got theirs November 21st.

Like I said only 1 or 2. Apple dont count due to them charging through the roof for hardware.

When 360 released, dual core CPUs for PCs were rediculous prices.

360 launched in Novemeber 2005 US. In US August 2005 Athlon dual core was roughly $400. The 360 released at $479.

Like I said. 360 having 16 core CPU in 18 months time is actually 80% likely and the Durango will likely cost $450 - $500 with a very noce 16 core CPU setup.

It could happen, there's not much room to go up clockspeed wise so the increase of performance needs to come from more cores. From 3x3.2 Ghz cores to 16x4.0 Ghz cores is still only half as big a jump as XBox to Xbox 360 in pure available clockspeed.

And you're right that multi cores weren't as popular yet amongst pc's. But the Xenon is also not the same as a full general purpose x86 cpu. There's no reason this new 16 core cpu could be a specialized cheaper version again.

I do find it hard to believe that Kinect 2.0 will need 50% more processing power then the entire xbox 360. It could need priority on 4 cores to get things done quickly in parallel but I don't think it will need 100% of 4 cores. Unless it's going to poll the device at 240fps.

When ps3 and 360 go to 16 cores it will be a while though until developers can max out the hardware. Making efficient use of 16 cores isn't going to be easy. We could have a situation that early games even perform slightly worse as the engines are optimized to use 2 or 3 cores and suddenly have to manipulate 8x the memory. (Please let 4gb be true!)

16 core seems a bit much. 4 core with hyper-threading or possibly 8 core (with or without hyper-threading) seems more likely. They should focus on having a better gpu as opposed to cpu power.

Oh, I forgot Intel had their Pentium D (dual core) cpu, which was released around the same time as the Athlon 64 X2 in 2005.

i predict sonys and microsofts next console will be much less powerful than people are expecting

i would go as far to say they both will be budget ranged with low price points

I have a very hard time believing this knowing what is out there right now. I guess if the architecture is right, then maaaaaaaybe, but I just don't see it. More likely to be a hexacore or a quad core. 16 cores seems unreasonable, you don't use a CPU for graphics (optimally) so why so much CPU power? Power is another reason, the pure wattage devoted to 16 cores would be ridiculous, look at the cooling problems that the original 360 processor had.

Now of course some idiot could have seen the specs for the CPU and gpu, added them up and been like, "yay 16 cores!". I think this is as likely as ps4 being made completely of hemp.

When i think durango. I think of this...

I'll focus once they change that. 

they mustang you for that one.