because they apparently have 8 gb of ram to work with. unified ram was liked on the 360 because they didnt have enough ram to work with last gen so every little bit helps. largest ram on a single gpu today is 3gb...and here we have microsoft supposedly making a unified ram design because they are worried 4 and 4gbs split will be too low?

What that crazy talk abou component parts? Sony buy just the chip and not all the mainboard... the GPU chip didn'd costs 300 it's more like 100... a better list:

CPU +APU +GPU = $200
4GB GDDR5 = Storage = Maainoard and others components = $100

Overall cost for Sony = $400-450

which mean $400 for a small loss or $500 for a small profit with a quick price drop if sales slow and they've made their initial money.

oh and does anybody know how high R&D costs are? i read somewhere that it costed Sony like $170 to make the Vita but R&D supposedly drove it up to costing $310 when it was all said and done(when it was in retailers hands)

resulting in them losing $60 each Vita sale at launch being that its retail price was $250

If Sony use's the Spur's Engine on the same Die as the CPU/GPU chip its Quite likely they could infact work out Backward Compatability

sounds like this: 

And now more exciting news, SCEA posted a patent application for "DYNAMIC CONTEXT SWITCHING BETWEEN ARCHITECTURALLY DISTINCT GRAPHICS PROCESSORS": 

"Graphics processing in a computer graphics apparatus having architecturally dissimilar first and second graphics processing units (GPU) is disclosed. Graphics input is produced in a format having an architecture-neutral display list. One or more instructions in the architecture neutral display list are translated into GPU instructions in an architecture specific format for an active GPU of the first and second GPU." 

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220120320068%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20120320068&RS=DN/20120320068

And now for the "real" question... how expensive will it be to develop games if these speca are right? it sure can't be that cheap.

7970m for 100 bucks? I want what youre smoking... 7970m is a 200 dollar upgrade on most laptops over 7800 series gpu.

They actually said that?

I also read somewhere that it costed Nintendo like $100 to make the 3DS when it was launched at $250(profitting) but when they dropped the retail price to $170 they were losing money each sale so R&D(manufacturing and getting it into retailers hands) has to cost anywhere from $70 to $140

so lets just take $100(for R&D) and add that to how much it costs Sony to assemble the PS4

This is why i always said that i wanted Sony to make a $500 console(including R&D) and sell it at $400(losing $100 each PS4 sale) at launch

The profits lines will be met much quicker than when PS3 was supposed to hit the profit line. PS4 will be cheap and will BOOM in all regions at that $399 price point from jump so they wont have worry about every developer and all the fans crying for a $100 price drop(basically widening the the time it would take to reach profit lines and makeing them take losses for a much longer time than originally expected)

it will be cheap enough so the kids can get PS4s and the games will sell from jump which will offset a lot of those losses

Assuming that the first 6 months or even a year that they will take a loss on the Ps4. Do you think Sony is willing to discourage investors by showing them 2-4 quarter losses in a row yet again? Especially knowing that it took Sony to sell one of their major HQs just to make a profit this quarter since 2008?