Well, in constrast to some guy here who said that esram is ms' way to rival $ony, let's start from the beginning:

MS and $ony both began development years before. MS had quite a comfort situation - the hardware was quite easy to program for, rather cheap to build and they had, like always, good dev-tools while $ony had a dev-disaster with ps3 - complicated hardware, bottlenecks, unfinished dev-tools.

The problem is that MS thought "their" way is the right - they make some changes to hardware, keep their good dev-tools and offer more tv-/app-stuff.

Of course the hardware was a concern and they built esram to the chip because they knew of 3d-hardware and -software and knew that low-latency, high-bandwidth-memory will improve 3d-calculations. They also had in 360. You can't say they didn't put much effort in the system-design - the SHAPE-chip seems to be far more capable than any other competitor, freeing the APU completely from audio-processing. Also, the esram-ddr3-solution is not a bad one, just not as good as $ony's solution.

$ony had to improve almost everything from ps3 dev- and hardware-wise and made a bold move with using gddr5 - it was only luck that prices got so low that they can now include 8 gb gddr5-ram. But "Das Glück ist mit den Tüchtigen" :)

To judge the decisions now is easy - I think MS would have taken another path to develop the console which seems to be a problem by now also in terms of dev-tools. Some hinted that MS is not as ready as $ony is which doesn't mean they are worse, of course.

The thing with "all in one package is because of performance - if you include everything in one chip you don't have long delays for data and of course MS hopes that over a few years they can vastly improve cost, size and heat with this one package, allowing for a smaller console and less power-consumption.

I'm getting really worried now

Another bullshit rumour, feel free to quote me if I'm wrong. I have no doubt the yields will be low, they always are on new tech, I seriously doubt theyre cutting the clock speed down, it would cause havoc with the entire package design.

Yes you keep thinking that. Better yet don't think or panic and keep your head in the Clouds ;) By taken over media if you mean bad press and online backlash sure. On youtube the ps4 reveal got 20mill+ views in a week while the xbox one unveiling is at a measly 5.6 million (and M$ pathetically disabled comments) while its parody tvtvtvspoatzcalladuty video, and the ps4 console teaser beat it lol. But in teh Cloudz everything is dandy and well LOL :D "XBOX GO HOME!!!"

I think he's from the UK. Isn't always cloudy there?

wouldn't low yield just mean low shipment numbers at launch until it is figured out?

It's just a little slower! It's still good, it's still good!

ICY and NY-CRISIS
thank you for those jokes, i just laughed for a sweet minute and can finally get some sleep with happiness, hopefull i don't have dreams of cloudz xD

Problem here is that so many of these "little rumors" have proven to be true, so why should anyone believe that this one will be any different?

probably, but if you want high shipment numbers at launch and a downgrade of the clockspeed can fix the problems of the faulty chips, you could also go down that route.

problem is, if you do that you can't fix it later.