Apply this to next nintendo console, and it willl have 32 Gb.
And people will claim that 128Gb is necessary and nintendo is doomed again.

Ok, fine. I don't want to enter into a tech war that I know I'm going to lose anyway.

But what I was trying to say, besides the obvious, is that the next time putting more of everything will not work... but not because it wouldn't be possible or a good way to go, but because it could be too expensive.

Think about what you said, go from 1100 shaders to 4 or 5 thousand. With the problems TSMC is having reducing the manufacturing processes and chip with so many "bits" in it is going to be or very expensive, or very big, or both. So I don't think numbers will increase that much because we are at a point (or we'll reach it very soon), that GPUs will have to look at CPU development and forget the old "more and faster" approach and instead start focusing more on efficiency, like Nvidia seems to have done.

But of course that's just me and my rumblings.

We are kinda in agreement. Though I think of it somewht differently.

First off, where we disagree is that I know thats not how chip manufacturing works. Have you ever heard this saying about how much a processor cost?

"The first processor off the production line costs $5B. Every chip after that costs $15."

That is basically telling you that what makes chips expensive is the amount of R&D that goes into them. But the actual chip from an actual wafer doesn't really cost that much. So yes, for every $15 chip that comes off the fab line, over $5B in R&D could have been sunk into it. They make that money back either from chargng a premium per chip or just having a very very high volume of chips ordered. How this ties into consoles, right now theer are already processors that are pushing upwards of 4000 shader cores on a 28nm fab process. The cheapest one of such procesors cost $399 today at retail. So probably costs the OEM (AMD in this case) $249 to order from whoever actually makes it for them. In two years, that exact same chip will cost half as much if not less. And in 5, significantly less. Now the second a company like sony or MS comes in and signs a deal with AMD for those chips to put in their next console, AMD is looking at potentially over 100M orders for the chip, this can bring the cost of the chips down much much more. So even if by that time we are stuck at a 14nm fab process, I wouldn't expect the PS4 to have anything more than a chip that has more than 4000-5000 cores even if as you say (and I agree) they can put in more.

Where we agree is that I also don't think next gen will be just about more of everything. Thas what this gen is for. Next gen would be about focusing on specific areas in the hardware that would optimize performance much more than just throwing in more RAM or more cores. A lot of people talk up things like 4k rez, I think that stuff like that is irelevant with regard to the bigger picture. The extra power in the consoles would be geared towards things like better AI, Physics, global illumination..etc while still maintaining a 1080p frame buffer and at most liklye stable 30/60fps. And the rendered frame would just be upscaled to 4k if needed by a special seperate upscaler chip. Its just a better smarter use of resources.

This is why I feel that when people talk about next gen hardware now, they aren't actually talking about the things everyone is really gonna focus on. They are just talking about the stuff we all know to talk about toay. CPU/GPU/RAM. Those aren't the areas that would define the  next gen consoles.

Nope, that is just bad science and engineering sadly.

VRAM is becoming more important than actual RAM, and as long as consoles give themselves the arbitrary power limit of 100 W, they won't ever have much in them.

@Intrinsic: I've read about the actual cost of the chips and I know its low. Basically they are paying X amount for a wafer, so if they get 10 working chips each cost X/10, but if they get 20 then they cost X/20. That's why I said chips that big would be expensive, there will be less in each wafer. But of course it will all depend on the fab process available by then and how good it is.

As for the things that they should focus on, better AI, Physics, global illumination, etc., I completely agree but, as this thread reminds us

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=193018

Developers also have to do their part of the job, and so far they haven't.

Im not sayint that is the best way , more accurate and definitive comparison between architectures, I just say that is the most common way to compare theoretical gpu computing power. 

The best way to compare gaming hardware is with games, not even benchmarks, and games show that being the cpus of this gen consoles almost equal, the PS4 is faster having lots of games running at 1080p and the XBOXone at 800-900p because of the GPU. 

That said, PS3 CPU has more theoretical flops than PS4 CPU, and some benchmarks like ubisoft show that is as powerfull. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications

"PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves a theoretical maximum of 230.4 GFLOPS^[3] in single precision floating point operations and up to 100 GFLOPS double precision using iterative refinement for the solution of linear equations."

Architectures are completly different and cell normally dont even get close to that flops in real life. PS4 CPU is an atom like chip that can run two threads per core at 1.6 GHz, nothing great at all. 

http://www.vgleaks.com/playstation-4-xbox-one-comparison-chart

PS4 CPU is capable of 103 GFlops

If we talk about integer performance, again the core of PS4 is dual issue, nothing great. It might be better than PS3 but it wont make a game changer

I dont care if the PS4 CPU is a little lower, a little faster  or at the same level than PS3, its just clear that the PS4 design centered in a GPU 10 times as powerfull at least in Gflops than the PS3 RSX. Thats where the new gen gets its power.

If CPUs like Intel Core I5 or Core I7 runs at almost 4 GHz and issue 4 instruction per clock per core, I hope that next gen PS5 at least double the CPU performance of PS4.  

In the meantime programmers will try to use the power of gpu computation to get better physics. 

That doesn't make it right.
For years people used "Mhz" to compare processors, I.E. Regardless if it was a Celeron, Pentium 3, Duron or Athlon, it was "Mhz" that people used to differentiate performance, which was ironically just as pointless as using the "flops" denominator.

Exactly, we agree on something.
Games have shown that these new consoles are significantly more powerfull in the CPU stakes. - You just need to look at the ballooning A.I characters on screen in some titles for such proof.
I won't point you to any recent titles (Like Dead Rising 3), I'm sure you can find them on your own.

I am pretty sure that I've had people tell me of the Cells "1 Teraflop" of theoretical performance, like that could ever be possible.
The Cell was a cheap, low-end and slow CPU, no way is it out performing Intels latest and greatest 8 Core/16 thread, monolothic $1000 monster.
It's meant to be thrown into a low-cost box.
My Core i7 3930K (6 cores, 12 threads @ 4.8ghz) manages 100Gflop in benchmarks, that means it's slower than the Playstation 4's 8-Core Jaguar and Playstation 3's Cell. - You see the point I'm trying to make? And the irony yet?

Are you comparing Jaguar to Atom? REALLY?

For starters, Jaguar is more like Brazos than Atom and in turn, Brazos is more like a full featured Athlon/Phenom Core, that's to be expected, Atom and Jaguar is from two different companies.

Jaguar doesn't have Hyperthreading, it's not an in-order design which I assume is what you were insinuating. (Latest Atom's, are Out-of-order now and removed Hyper Threading in favour of real cores, becoming more like AMD's Jaguar, performance increase was dramatic.)

Jaguar is wider and fatter, it actually has allot of similarities with AMD's K6 design in some aspects. (Like being a 2-issue.)
But comparing it to Atom? Really? Brazos could beat Atom, Jaguar is faster than Brazos on a per-clock basis.
All 8 Jaguar cores would be roughly equivalent to a 3ghz Dual-Core Core i3 Haswell processor in terms of performance, which is certainly better than last generation, where those with 6-7 year old Core 2 processors could have enjoyed the entire generation without a CPU upgrade.

Again FLOPS is absolutely pointless.

What about Geometry performance? What about Fillrate? What about Integer?
Even if the PS4's GPU was EXACTLY the same as the PS3's GPU in terms of flops, it's still going to be faster.

It's simply a more efficient, more modern design, which is far less limiting. (I.E. More Programmable, far less fixed function baggage.)

Your I7 3930K is teorethically capable of more than 100 Gflops. Benchmarks never reach peak theorethical Gigaflops. 

PS4 Jaguar is a much simpler processor, and thats why i compared it to Atom, also because everybody knows Atoms and should know that is not an I7. New Atoms are OOO. Anyway, Jaguar is normally compared with Bobcat, its predecesor, and its not even an Athlon. Athlons were 3 issue designs from the beginning, Jaguar can issue only 2 instructions per clock per core. There are a lot more architecture things to it, but thats not the central point of the topic.

Despite the bad core, I agree with you, 8 CPUS can achieve the level of performance of I3 in multi threaded aplications. But in single threaded ones the I3 just kill the Jaguar. 

I think that the PS4 has a weak CPU, just enough for the GPU it carries. 8 GB are just enough too, considering that the OS takes almost 3 GB of it. The GPU is also just enough for 1080p.  Its a balanced piece of hardware just enough for full hd. 

If developers do future games as they do now, you will need 4 times the power for 4K. Dont you agree that less than that will fall short for a future gen machine?