8 GB for consoles is overkill imo, unless there are severe multitasking features. But for games alone 8 GB is too much, 4 GB will be more than enough.

Exactly. But some people actually believe 8gb will be used. Even on PC, games use 1.5-2.5 gb of RAM (VRAM+System RAM) on a single monitor on high to ultra settings. Add the Windows OS and other background processes (average) and you get ~4gb.

Consoles wont have such a sofisticated OS like Windows and such multitasking will be optimised, so 1gb to 1.5gb would be more than enough to set aside. Games will use about ~1.5gb as well depending on hardware.

The question is not what you think or want, no matter if you want 4Gb just because according to you, 8Gb won't be required, but what matters is what third parties want and if it is viable when it comes to manufacturing costs. When Epic said that 360 needed 512Mb, no matter if you wanted 256, MS had to obey them and put more memory.

This is the same case, maybe Sony and MS intended to put 4Gb, but if thirds are whining for 8Gb they will put 8Gb in the end.

It then all boils down to how feasible SONY/MS can get it going, keeping in mind the total production costs and need for selling the console at a profit asap.

Haha wow. Games don't just transfer all their assets over to RAM upon game load. I have 8GB of RAM and don't have long load times at all. And I have a traditional HDD, not an SSD. Good lighting effects need more RAM, not less. I can't see how you think good lighting reduces RAM usage? Texture Streaming isn't something you want to be totally rely on either.

No, it is PC like. The only difference is console games have direct hardware access and don't use DirectX or OpenGL to access the hardware. They both use RAM, just the PS3 uses XDR RAM which is faster than DDR2 that was standard at the time.

Well they better start being designed to multitask. Smartphones multitask now. People don't want a single use box anymore. The in-game XMB is one of the slowest, most frustrating software experiences I've ever put up with. You should be able to message somebody quickly while in a game, and a GREAT feature would be to leave the game running while going back to the main OS, kind of like hitting Alt-Tab while in a PC game. That would allow you to open the browser without having to reload the game. 

Well if they are using one of the two memory stacking technologies then they can have both high performance and more memory. They will either use DDR4 or GDDR5 and I suspect the former rather than the latter. They could go as wide as 512/1024 bits and get extremely good latency and power efficiency if they are willing to take a stab at it. Given the history of consoles using exotic/fast memory buses it wouldn't be unprecedented and quite justifiable as there are many algorythims which are memory bandwidth constrained which could be used to good effect.

8gb ram would only encourage lazy programmers to be lazier. There us no real need for this much ram. And I dont think that xbox3 or ps4 will carry that much ram. They will have 4gb max, and at least 1gb of this ram will be used by OS only.