@CosmicSex: That's mindblowing. I can't find that TB model in stores around here, but Samsung's 85 inch 4K TV UE85HU7500 is less than 10,000 €. As I said, that price is ridiculous.

@phinch1: lol. "I was on the fence when it said it required 2 AA batteries, but when it said those were included, I thought "How can I afford NOT to buy this TV." Best bargain around. Don't wait to buy, this price won't last forever."

I seriously doubt RAM will scale in such a linear fashion into the next generation of consoles.

First, it's safe to assume most if not all will stick with a unified memory architecture like the XBO and PS4.

System memory probably won't scale up considerably from current unless there is a greater dependence upon background functions running constantly. This would be useful for multi-tasking, but primarily for system functions and services as there isn't much benefit to running more than a couple apps simultaneously.

I would expect multitasking to be handled a bit more like mobile OS in that the OS would pause functions in certain applications as they are no longer being used, resulting in a minimal use of memory and suspended CPU functions.

So the question to ask is what resolution will the next generation of consoles be designed for? Presumably 4K as these displays become more common over the next 5 years. It seems doubtful any console manufacturer would support multiple displays as they simply aren't practical for the typical living room in which they are used.

At 4K resolutions, current video cards generally require 4GB of DDR5 dedicated to the GPU for current games. Back in 2008, when the PS3 and XB360 were running ports of PC games, the typical aftermarket PC video card had 512MB of dedicated VRAM with most systems set at 1920x1080. System memory was typically around 4GB, but this was rarely a restriction for game engines, even with the greater system memory overhead of Windows in gaming.

So the VRAM scale is already consistent with 4K gaming on PC, but consoles are hobbled by overall processing power by the CPU/GPU in the interest of cost, power consumption and size.

Of course consoles are typically designed to run games for the next 5 plus years, so it's not unrealistic to say that 9th gen consoles will be designed to run games being developed well into the mid, even late 2020s (!). Hard to project what sort of memory requirements games will have ten years from now.

Much of the memory allotments will have to do with the price of the memory being used in the late 201Xs when development on 9th gen consoles (hardware specs) begins to solidify.

I wouldn't be surprised to see anywhere from 16GB to 64GB unified, high speed memory being used, but I would actually expect a more conservative amount of memory if it accounts for 25% or more of the total BoM of a given console.

It's important to point out that within the PC space, the only reason for 16GB+ memory is not for gaming by a long shot; it's for content producers, particularly those working with huge image files, 4K video production and artists working in 3D content who tend to run image processing, video production and 3D production suites simultaneously.

Go ahead and check what type of memory a high end ($1600 build) gaming set up uses: it's 8GB. That's right: 8GB. The money used for more than that is better allocated towards a 256GB SSD. The video card (R9 290X) uses 4GB of GDDR5.

@Pemalite : I know it's possible to squeeze that much memory on the next consoles, but will it be worth it? After all, they aren't really PCs but a mix of a console with a multimedia player, and their multitasking capabilities won't improve that much compared to what they can do right now. I don't see what they could use that much RAM, honestly, unless they load the whole game into the RAM.

As for new NAND that replaces both the need for separated HDD/SSD and RAM, that would be interesting... but will it be cost effective even whenever the next consoles launch?

Agreed, shared memory seems to be what all consoles are settling for now.

Not entirely accurate.

I game at beyond 4k (7680x1440 to be exact), while 4Gb of video memory is certainly enough for now, games are starting to become more complex thanks to the consoles increasing the hardware baseline. (Finally!)
Newer game releases are certainly giving my Quad-Radeon R9 290's with 4Gb of video memory a run for their money, almost to the point where it would actually be worth upgrading to 8Gb cards.

Also, the average PC no longer has 512Mb of Video Memory, it's 1024Mb now, with 2gb right behind it.
2gb and 4gb video memory capacities are seeing the largest growth in gaming PC's.
Go check out Steams statistics.

Will it be worth it? Well. It really depends on the rest of the hardware really and the cost/benefit, no point loading a system up with Ram if you can't make use of that much memory. (GPU's and CPU performance development is slowing down in the PC space, which will affect next-gen.)
If Sony/Microsoft can throw in a faster Graphics Chip at the expensive of memory capacity, they would probably do so, 8Gb of Ram is fantastic right now in regards to cost/capacity, which is why these consoles wen't with that capacity. (Amongst other things.)

The big benefit though will come with Multi-Tasking, ever used Windows when it's loaded into a RAM drive? It's freaking nuts, you feel like superman on crack.


As for NAND, TLC NAND is especially cost effective, it's not able to be competitive with Optical Discs and Hard Drives in terms of size/cost ratio's just yet, but it's been making rapid progress over the few years.
NAND can also take advantage of really low fabrication nodes, because of how simple it is to make relative to a hand-designed processor.

I remember just a few years ago, picking up an OCZ SSD, that was 64Gb in size and cost me about $150.
Today, I can get an SSD 4x as large, for less, give it a console generation and see how things stack up. :P

No, I haven't used a computer with a RAM drive. But I loved your analogy!

As for NAND evolution, let me start saying that I don't know much about it, but if I'm not wrong they are already producing it at 20nm and with the troubles everybody (even Intel) are having to go below that point, I don't see them going beyond 14nm once next gen launches. Also NAND is still not as fast as RAM, so they still have work to do on that front.

And on top of that, even though TLC NAND is here and cheap enough, its lifespan is also lower than "regular" NAND and that is something of concern if you plan to go into smaller nodes, which will shorten its life even more, and try to use it also as RAM memory, which will dramatically increase its write-read operations shortening again its lifespan.

I'm afraid there's still a lot of work until we reach that point, even less when its affordable enough to use it on consoles.

I posted this in a comment about a page or 2 back: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/storage/how-universal-memory-will-replace-dram-flash-and-ssds-1222632

The technologies mentioned in this article could allow for 1000X the speed of NAND (which I believe is currently around 300MB/s), with more storage life to the data, potentially could be a reality by 2018, so maybe PS5 could go into production around that time and we could see standard RAM being replaced by Solid State Drives with better speed than the best DDR3 today. The only issues beyond the usual changes to different technologies may be the latency, although it's still in the nanoseconds according to Crossbar (one of the companies developing RRAM).

Apparently Crossbar's RRAM can be made using today's fabrication plants, so we may see it go into production in the next few years.

RRAM seems to be a much better solution than NAND because it's better in practically every category from latency, to bandwidth to density.

Apparently a 1TB module of RRAM was about 1/2 the size of a NAND Flash module, that was written about in this article from last year: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484798/emerging-technology/memory-wars--rram-vs--3d-nand-flash--and-the-winner-is---us.html

To get an idea of the kind of speed RRAM can offer this part of the article can give a good indication of what's possible:

"When it comes to performance, RRAM brings yet another advantage. A NAND flash chip today has about 7MB/sec write speeds. SSDs and flash cards can achieve 400MB/sec speeds by running multiple chips in parallel.

A RRAM chip boasts 140MB/sec write speeds, and that's without parallel interconnects to multiple chips, Minassian said."

That's only a single chip though, not a module, which I believe is multiple chips stacked either on top of each other or flipped on their sides and placed next to each other, side-by-side.

What's written in that article sound very promising.

The best thing about the potential of using RRAM is that it would actually reduce a stage of the manufacturing process because rather than having to stick a bunch of RAM chips on the motherboard the production facility would just have to install what is basically an SSD, that then acts as RAM and storage.

Apparently production facilities are already outfitted to make it and it's inexpensive, may only cost a few million dollars in engineering costs to introduce to plants.

According to the Techradar article Crossbar says it hopes to get RRAM to market next year. I think that probably means servers would start using it first and then over the years it will trickle down to the PC market. If Crossbar's RRAM goes into production by 2015, we could see the technology evolve to even greater levels of performance by the time Sony starts to produce PS5 or maybe an even faster kind of solid state storage.

@JustBeingReal: Thanks for the links. It sounds very promising. but it has to be said that it's not the first time a company, and they use to be small ones, make such claims.

We'll see if this time it is true.

It's sad how people think more ram means more power lol.

I'm aware of the Steam stats; the 512MB was standard back in 2008. The fact that it's now only 1024MB six years later is hard to overlook.

No one will be building a console for a triple 2560x1440 display set up. At least Sony, MS or Nintendo won't. The Steam Box is its own thing as far as I'm concerned, with no set hardware specs so I hope nobody tries to throw that in seeing as how we're really talking about the PS5 here. 

And presumably, no one will be building a console made to run 4k resolution at the same quality as a $1000+ video card set up for obvious reasons. 

There will definitely have to be a bigger jump in hardware specs between the 8th and 9th gen than there was between the 7th and 8th though if the major console developers are planning on going the 4k route with acceptable performance. Otherwise, we'll probably be seeing developers running their games between 1080p and 4k resolutions, the same way a lot of games are currently running under 1080p on 8th gen consoles. 

It's a simple cost issue. If anyone doesn't get that, then they really shouldn't be making guesses as to what type of specs we can reasonably expect to see in the next gen of consoles. 

If GDDR5 or whatever memory Sony and MS are planning on using 5 or so years from now costs about $80-100 for 16GB, then that's what we'll see. If $100 buys 32GB, 32GB it is. If for whatever ridiculous reason, the price of high speed RAM plummets due to massive, unforseen advances in production methods out of step with pricing trends over the last 10+ years, maybe we'll see even more. 

At that point, most engineers would probably want to prioritize spending more on the CPU/GPU, or maybe even going with solid state memory for the internal storage.