It really is ridiculous how far ahead CPU's are after the introduction of multicore chipsets, my damn near ancient quad-core is still kicking ass in all the games I've tried and has never been above 75%. GPU power and faster memory clocks and bandwidth will be the way to avoid bottlenecks in the next 3-5 years. I feel that Nvidia are really onto something with their Maxwell architecture; amazingly low consumption and thus heat generation and terrific performance per transistor and relative to the bit-rates, I'm actually buying a GTX 980 (Zotac or Gigabyte, have to see which fits my cabinet best) very soon since they're even introducing high-tier cards on the market at a decent price, which used to be AMD's territory alone.

These are good times to be a PC gamer!

I think 16 GB of ram will be overkill for a console next gen. As others have said what we need are faster gpus and faster ram.

In a console set up I don't think having faster RAM wil be to much of an issue. Right now but the PS4/XB1 uses a 256bit memory Bus. The WiiU however uses a 1024bit bus. Though it uses much slower RAM. If the PS4/XB1 had a 1024but RAM bus then overall memory bandwidth would literaly quadriple. Its not that simple but thats the general Idea.

I think where some of the most radical changes would be made next gen will be in the feild of storage and transfer speeds between storage and system ram. The things on CPU/GPU and RAM are pretty much a lock now with some very basic forward thinking and if you just look at what is already out there.

I remember the 8GB PS4 threads getting laughed at. Most people were expecting 2-4GB. At the most, I expect PS5 to have 64GB. And 32GB of that will be purely for OS features we can't think of right now. 32GB sounds more realistic to me. It really depends on how long this gen lasts.

Lawls no

That's some bloated up OS you've got there

32GB for OS features alone? The most taxing OS around right now draws 2-3GB at most. My Win 7 takes up about 2.2GB at present. People are actually attempting to streamline their OS today and are integrating more processes into the core scripts and registry, freeing system memory for other vital tasks. Steam OS, for instance, aims to free memory for gaming purposes instead, it really is needlessly taxing on the memory to run most OS processes and a big chunk of expended memory is simply wasted on archaic secondary processes, this is especially so in Windows.

Agree with the last point though but I think 32GB is the absolute highest possibility here, I find 24GB more likely though.

128GB of RAM? No way. I think 32 or 64 is a much more reasonable estimate. Especially since game sizes may increase by a similar factor, with most games this gen already using up all of the 50GB available on a Blu-Ray. (There's the rumor of Sony and Panasonic working on a 300GB successor to Blu-Ray.)

That would be awesome! Other things may play a factor in this happening. Since the previous consoles started on lead tube TVs and did coax cable. Then RCA and componite. Flat projection. To high deffinition 720. To the stuff now with hdmi.

Might be the 4,000k resolution super ultra 3D deff. TV that we'll be able to play it on. I'ld preorder it now if I could.

Biggest bottleneck on any platform right now is consumer spending amounts.. We are fast reaching the limits on the budgets the industry software can sustain.