I agree with you. I don't see how it makes sense. I think they are trying to say it is really strong, but the companies won't know how to use it maybe? That doesn't work though because they have been using it in GPU's for a while now. All it is, is super fast ram that is meant for video cards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3e6Wy19jbo

DDR5 doesn't exist yet. GDDR5 is a form of DDR3 optimized for graphics.

Two components of a computer need access to RAM - the GPU and the CPU. The GPU is bandwidth limited. Higher bandwidth = greater performance here, generally.

The CPU though is latency limited. This is why GDDR RAM is not used as system RAM. Most RAM on a PC goes to the CPU, only going to the GPU if there is not enough VRAM. GDDR5 has very high latency. It would not perform well at all.

People need to stop thinking higher numbers equals better solutions. Most of that 8GB won't be used anyway. Blu-ray has a read speed of somewhere around 20MB/s. What's 8192 / 20? It would take close to a 7 minute load in order to cache all of the data in RAM. 

Oh come now.  Its the start of a new gen, people are getting fired up.  The same thing is going to happen when the 720 is unveiled, and for the next 2 years the forums are overall goning to go to hell, but in a sort of good way.

Bold: That made me genuinly lol, its so true

They're hyping it because it will make a difference. Anything over that abyssal amount that the PS3 had is a positive. GDDR5 presents more bandwidth and again, that's a positive. You can't deny that its an awesome addition.

That said, 8 gigs is absolutely over kill when mid range cards today hardly even hit 2 in usage.

It'll be interesting to see the tradeoff of low-latency for CPU vs high-bandwidth for GPU in the two consoles. But regardless of that tech, having the same RAM size would help developers as that's one less thing they need to think about when designing assets/levels for multiplats. Also at the end of the current 360/PS3 gen, RAM is continually being mentioned as the main bugbear for modern game development. RAM is also the easiest component to scale down and reduce cost, so again it's probably better to have more than not enough.

Also a ton of RAM will enable pre-loading of assets and whatever else, and saves re-loading prior areas. If anything it'll save wear and tear on the optical drive which sometime sounds like it's going to kill me, especially on the 360. :)

roffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffllllllllllllllllllll ok, thx.

I find it sad that people equate developers needs to the (averige) consumer needs.

They are two different things. Very different things...

Not according to every 3rd party dev I've seen interviewed on the subject...

I'm more annoyed at people who don't get it's 8GB unified memory, and only think system memory when they compare it to PC instead of system + video memory.