It appears MS is running a stacked die. Starting to see that with guys like Xilinx in the FPGA world, who also use TSMC as their fab. It's possible that the APU has some more tricks up it's sleeve. At the very least, there appear to be a lot of hard cores (co-processors, etc.) that offload workload from the CPU/GPU.

At the end of the day, it would appear that both consoles will push great visuals. Going to come down to the games (shocker).

Thanks ethomaz and pemalite for breaking down the technical jargon to me. The capabilities of both systems are amazing for me that like to play my games on dedicated hardware.

So is it possible for internal teams to unlock more core(s) to favor gaming in case of a very ambitious project? Or the hardware architecture of both consoles are not that flexible?

Edit: How many GB of the 8 (RAM) is shared between OS and gaming? No speculation please.

At this stage "no" to the first question.
The real limiter shouldn't be the amount of cores anyway, it's the per-core performance, which is downright anemic.
The thing with CPU's is they are designed to be *very* good at serialised processing, whilst GPU's are great at parallel processing.

For example, the CPU would read a book, page by page untill it got to the very end, where-as a GPU would read every single Page at the same time.
Some tasks need to be read by the hardware page by page, having something that could read each page faster would be ideal. (And why it would be nice for Console manufacturers to take CPU performance seriously for once.)
It's actually very difficult to load balance serialised processing over multiple cores, because some things has to be processed at the right time.
This is why most games specifiy a "main" thread for all the important processing, then will give extra tasks to other cores like sound processing, what this means is one core is always going to have higher usage than others.

Of course, this time around however, the CPU will actually be processing less tasks than prior generations, things like Physics which benefits greatly from parallel processing will fly on the GPU for instance.

Over time however might be a differet story, this generation both Sony and Microsoft made their respective operating systems leaner and faster, so they might eventually free up a core for developers to use eventually, but I wouldn't hedge any bets on that.

As for the Ram, at this stage it's looking like 3.5Gb and 3Gb is reserved for the PS4 and Xbox One Operating Systems respectively, the rest is gaming, the PS4 however is "rumoured" to have 512Mb-1024Mb of that OS memory as something games might be able to use.
Keep in mind however, that when it comes to building a cconsole, you can always free up more memory for the OS's, but you can never take more later on in the generation.

It's kind of amazing considering the original Xbox only had 64mb of RAM, and the new CPU has 73% of that.  (Just the CPU!)

Just shows you how much better stats have gotten in just two generations.

Oh, now are you going to expect people to act Reasonable before a launch? 

Some of it is fun for people, and some of it is pure PR BS to help sell consoles.  But sadly, I think it mostly hurts the whole industry.

so how much more powerful will this be compared to  my X360S?  Is it going to be like a Xbox to X360 level leap; or like a DC to Xbox jump?  Also how does this compare with the Wii U? 

Some of it's kind of been rumored for a while.  But you seemed so happy when you preordered your PS4 I didn't want to be a downer on it.

Appropriate use of musical reference:

Funny Girl - Don't rain on my parade by guy-paul

quote for truth

I still try to figure out how all this will work together... Damn, MS! But it's good to see their special purpose processors freeing a lot of computing for cpu and gpu. Especially that SHAPE is freeing cpu from doing any audio-processing!