yeah I'm tired of people trashing on this.  It's next gen people!  We've been waiting for over 6 years to see new consoles (ok we probably weren't waiting for new ones when PS3 was coming out but still) and now that we have seen the first big graphical leap in over a half decade on consoles and gotten great dev feedback about all the stuff they can do along with awesome new social features (stop trying to play it down as just a share button and watch the Gaikai part of the presentation again if you truly believe that) and no one wants to get excited or when they do it's played down.  People have a right to be excited we've been waiting a LONG time for this!

Nope. The new Cell are the 8 Jaguar cores.

not only that but i dont' get how anyone can say sony didn't announce anything..

knack

the witness

killzone shadow fall

infamous second sons

drive club

deep down

new footage for watch dogs

the unnamed final fantasy game

diablo III (with exclusive content)

destiny (with exclusive content)

new control design 

share button for brag clips

a fully fleshed social aspect (ala facebook)

play games while still downloading

spectator mode to watch your friends play

take control of your friends play to help them out

a console pause functionality to eliminate load times when play is interrupted

remote play with vita

8 Gb of GDDR

...and probably a few other things but this is what i can remember of the top of my head.  how the fuck is that "nothing".  that is a whole lot of stuff announced in a 2 hour period.

not to mention there's still GDC, E3, and TGS to talk further about games, online features and pricing, and form factor so I don't get why everyone wanted Sony to blow their wad on this one early event.  Hell they haven't even said anything on what ND's second team is working on (this will be a big E3 reveal I'd bet)

yeah but once the announcements aren't done by their preffered company for some people they'll be irrelevant

There are two reasons why some may compare Sony's use of GDDR5 memory with the Cell processor.

1. Cost.  Despite the estimates given, GDDR5 memory is expensive.  Both in monetary cost and realestate.  Currently GDDR5 memory is only available in 16MB chips, meaning they require much more space in order to achieve 4GB let alone 8GB. 

2.  The speed has limited benefit.  Currently there is limited benefit to having so much fast memory.  A program gets loaded into memory and there it stays until it's shut down.  There's no speed benefit except for the loading part.   The faster memory does have an advantage for graphics, but there again largely with the initial loading.  Once a game is running, the benefit of the larger memory is negligable because of the solution Microsoft adopted. 

The cost vs. gain is small.  That being said, where the two diverge (Cell vs. GDDR5 memory) is that GDDR5 memory is a simple solution to a simple problem, and the long-term benefits aren't known.  Microsoft took a more technological solution to the problem.  The Cell processor was technological overkill for a simple problem.  A marvel, mind you, but overkill.  Akin to putting military grade ICs in action figures e.g. Toy Soldiers.

If this generation of consoles is short lived, say 5 years, I don't believe Sony's gamble will pay off.  If this generation is another 10 year generation, then I think it'll pay off.  It won't necessarily mean a significant performance leap ahead of Microsoft, but the cost of investment will pay off.  But it's a big chunk of money for Sony to spend. 

Also, I personally would be afraid of any developer that gets all giddy when he/she sees 8GB of memory.  The beauty of hardware constraints are that developers are forced to write clean, efficent code.  I am loathe to imagine what kind of sloppy code that will be generated because developers have such a large quanity of memory to work with on both machines, irrespective of speed.  One day it'll be used wisely, but for about two years I think we'll see lots of patched games to fix bad code.
 

its funny that you say that since the majority of nintendo fans i've seen have compared it with sony's past decisions ( which primarily would be cell and blu ray ) with regards to why they struggled with the ps3 in sales and financially

i suppose it depends on what perspective you're seeing these posts from

Cell was a CPU.... this is RAM we're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about.

If the extra ram can be used to say save the contents of an area to memory, and then there is no "area to area" load - in games such as Fallout4... then it will be amazing just for that :)

Sony's presentation came across to me as "We want to remove the hassles of gaming" - i.e slow boot times, slow getting into games (loading)... etc etc. So if the extra memory will help improve aspects of gameplay such as loading areas/levels, then that is enough for me... just hope its not too expensive for them to implement.

As another poster said, if this gen is short, it could be problematic for Sony, if its another 6+ years and the console has a 10 year life cycle, then it will be great, because over time they will be able to reduce the number of chips etc and cost.

There's a very good chance that next gen (PS4, next Xbox, and even the Wii U) will outlast the current gen in length/years.

I say that because technology isn't advancing as quick as it use to....sorta. I mean computer speeds (like ghz, etc) isn't taking leaps and bounds forward quite like it did 5 to 10 years ago. However, on the flipside we are seeing a lot more features and abilities included in new technology. Things such as wireless data/internet, voice and motion control, multi-device integration, etc are all becoming the norm. None of those require super fast computer parts to accomplish.

My prediction about the next gen is that the console features are what's going to give each console their edge and duration of lifecycle, it won't be the specs.