People still want to BS.

The difference is as SCE was extolling the virtues of the Cell to consumers, muti-platform developers were saying "WTF" when it came to optimization. Let's face it; the only developers who really milked the benefits of the architecture were exclusively developing for the PS3. 

With the PS4, SCE is hardly going off on the magical power of GDDR5; it's the developers who are more than happy to have the wider bandwidth and I'm sure will also be more than happy to have access to more of it over time, if not already.

So if we can just stop with the 5GB of GDDR3 RAM is good enough forever that would be fantastic. 

Yeah 3rd parties just didn't have the time to try and make an effort with the Cell, and its one of the reasons why quite a few games ran worse on the PS3... over time as tech develops then it got better... but using the Cell was certainly more of a hassle for developers than a help. Hopefully the PS4 is much better in this respect... and from people i've spoken to, they feel a lot happier with the PS4 than they did with the PS3.

DDR5 can't be a gimmick because DDR4 isn't even out yet. GDDR5 isn't a gimmick. It's been proven to aid GPUs in the PC market for sometime. The issue with GDDR5 is latency for general purpose processing. That is why the main memory of PCs is DDR3 it's primary function is better suited to DDR3. In a gaming console the higher bandwidth is better fit. It suits the dedicated purpose of the console. On a PC, gaming is a secondary function.

The "infinite" power of the Cloud is the new gimmick.

So it doesn't need the GDDR5 RAM because it is underpowered?

This is hilarious.

Sorry but this is completely false. You can check benchmarks from HD7700 and HD7850 cards for this. Because while a HD7850 only has 50% more ''raw calculating power'' it is 70%-100% faster in a lot of games. So the higher memory bandwidth does have a profound effect. And since the standard bandwidth of a HD7850 is only 153 GB/S the difference with PS4 will be even larger.

Pretty much.

 In my opinion, GDDR5 or Kinect 2.0 was Microsoft's option. They go with GDDR5 and Kinect 2.0 and I believe they're increasing/decreasing costs/profits.  They're banking that the non-gaming features, (Cloud) and Kinect will draw an army of casuals to encourage sales of their console more than having the 'best' looking games.  

Overall, not a terrible gamble from a sales perspective, from a pure gaming perspective though I'm not impressed.  The PS4 will create superior looking games most likely across the board and be the preferred console to develop for.There is a possibility that this will allow them to obtain an occassional third party exclusive down the line.

PS3 has 176 GB/s for the entire system...CPU, GPU, peripherals. That video card has 153 GB/s by itself.

And about those benchmarks... 7850 vs 7770 at 1080p is 50-70% faster in most games.

All those cards ethomz posted are 128 bit bus and 1600 mhz DDR3. 256 bit + 2133 mhz makes a difference.

Also I don't recall a single review where people complained about 7770s memory bandwidth. It got a lot of praise for power consumption to performance ratio...

I understand your logic though and there really is no way to be sure. The odds are that X1 may have seen 5-10% performance boost with GDDR5 and Microsoft didn't really think this will make a difference to bother. There is no reason to think Ms R&D is so incompetent and low on money that they couldn't get the most out of their hardware that they were going for.

There is no question that MS R%D knew what they started designing a few years ago. Just a few things to clear up some miconceptions why it ended where we are now:

First of all, both companies decided on the memory layout. Either unified memory or separate pools. No surprise here that both companies chose unified memory, as the XBox360 had a clear advantage over the PS3.

Next, the design goal for the XBox One was set: "The ultimate media hub/gaming console". Right from the start, it was clear that 4GByte of main memory would be a very, very tight solution, and I am pretty sure 8GByte memory was the undisputed starting point.  Now around 2008-2009 when development started, there was only one memory type that was capable of delivering 8GByte, and it was foreseeable that faster ddr3 ram would be available in the future. 8GByte gddr5 was (technically) impossible to achieve (it would have required a 512bit bus with 32 chips in clamshell mode which was way too costly to even consider). Hence the PS4 always had 4G of gddr5 ram (until the very, very last minute when the higher capacity 4Gb chips became available/affordable, and could boost the PS4 to 8GB without any (or minor) design changes to the mb.

The last decision was how to "beef up" the gpu memory access on the XBox One. Using embedded ram (either dram or sram) is a no-brainer for this purpose (both WiiU and XBox One use it). The PS4 could have had such a cache, too (and it was a possibility as we know now from a M.Cerny talk). The PS4 ended up with a single pool of 176G/s bandwidth, of which probably 150G go to the gpu on a sunny day (good enough for 1080p and optional gpgpu stuff) and 20G/s go to the rest (which is more than enough for game and os software). Why MS went with a huge 32MB esram and not 64M edram is their secret (insane, but would actually take a little less die space than 32M esram. On the other hand, WiiU shows that you can somehow get away with 32M edram but they were targeting a 40nm process, and in 2008 32M was considered insane. If they started developing now, everyone would probably go for stacked ram and forget all about caches).

The XBox One has a bit of a problem here. The esram has 102G/s throughput, already less than the 150G/s the PS4 gpu has. Unfortunately, the cache/gpu can only be "filled" with a less than (because frame buffer readout/updates locks you out 60 times per second) 68G/s data from the main ddr3 ram. Since the cache is only 32M (roughly half of which is reserved to frame buffers), there is not enough space to hold sizable textures etc in the cache, they have to be pumped from the "slow" ddr3 ram. We immediately see that the XBox One would profit from 176G/s gddr5 ram: it would greatly reduce the time to pump memory around from one pool to the other pool which blocks the entire system (there is a lot of stuff going on in the ddr3 ram, just think of Kinect2 data and all the multimedia stuff). This is what shocked MS when Sony announced the 8G bomb, in hindsight they could have had the unified 8G gddr5 AND the cache and have the superior harware...

Very detailed post.