So since the Xbone and PS4 both use AMD's new Jaguar architecture, I decided to attempt to come up with some realistic performance expectations for them. Okay, so basically my first question was, just how powerful was the Cell processor back in 06? In all likelyhood I'd group it with a high end CPU at the time, which was a Core 2 Duo E6700. 

So using that Core 2 Duo for the cell, I then looked up the benchmarks for it, it's CPU mark is at 1,583 which was pretty fucking amazing for its time. But now the top end i7's CPU mark is 12,094, so it's roughly eight times faster. The E3500 bobcat CPU only has 2 cores, hell, all off the bobcat CPUs only have two cores, and honestly they suck ass.

A high end ARM chips runs circles around a bobcat in certain tasks, and the %20 increase per core in the Jaguars simply bring the cores up to par with a high end ARM chip in certain tasks. But anyways, the E3500's CPU mark is at a 775.....for both cores, add on the 20% performance increase and it's at around 1,100. So all in all, not that bad especially after considering the CPU has eight cores, and from what I've heard the chips are basically two jaguars glued together, okay, so let's say that the other six cores in the jaguar all scale directly, then the PS4's and Xbone's CPU's mark would be at 4,400 which is almost three times the performance of the cell which is roughly the power of a high end I3 processor.

Of course, this is all under my scaling method which is extremely flawed, but was the only way I could compare them considering that the jaguar chips haven't come out yet. Anyways the CPU's performance should be that of a high end I3 processor, which will be enough to power a dedicated gaming console with a lot less OS overhead. 

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Jaguar is nowhere near as powerful today as the Cell was in 2006, or the 360 CPU was in 2005.

Nope. Jaguar is significantly more powerfull.

The problem with the PS3 and Xbox 360's CPU was many.
For starters they only really excelled in one type of math. (I.E. Linear Equations for the PS3), which is completely unrealistic when designing a game.
Plus, they were In-Order designs and not very wide ones at that, they were designed as low-cost, low performing solutions with the transister budgets to match.

Jaguar however is monolithic in comparison, it's fully Out-of-order, larger and more caches, more bandwidth, amazing branch predictor compared to the old consoles (PS3 didn't have one.).
Essentially, the Jaguar can do more work per clock over more  cores with minimal effort by the developers, it will be even more interesting to see how developers utilise the instruction sets to eek out more performance over time.

Comparatively, an 8-Core Jaguar should perform similar to an Ivy-Bridge/Haswell 3ghz+ Hyper Threaded Dual-Core if all things are equal.

The cell was far superior to the tri-core CPU found in the Xbox 360, which was inferior to the Core 2 Duo I compared the Cell against, which was roughly twice as fast as a 2 core bobcat chip, add in the 20% power increase that the new Jaguar architecture gives,  and consider the 6 OTHER cores, both CPU's are clearly superior to last gens and it's not even close. 

I didn't say Cell/Xenon were as strong as Jaguar, I was talking about how  the Cell compared to 2006 cards versus how  Jaguar compares to today's cards.

Ahhhh, my bad lol.

I kinda doubt Sony/MS would choose CPUs weaker than PS3/360's for their next gen consoles, haha. XD

lol yeah, but to answer your question, the Cell proccessor would be an absolute beast by 2006 standards if it were easy to code for, and the tri-core CPU in the 360 wasn't a pushover either compared to high end CPU's at the time. 

Yeah, that's what I was saying, PS3/360 were freaking monsters for their time. Not that the Jaguars in PS4/X1 are bad, they're not, I'm just not sure they're quite as beastly powerful for their time.

Yeah, the Jaguar architecture is designed for tablets and netbooks, and with that in mind the CPU the PS4 and Xbone have are beastly compared to other CPU's in netbooks and tablets on the market, they most likely went with thid rather than the trinity architecture due to heating issues, so while they aren't impressive compared to desktop CPU's, they're hella impressive for what they are.