Having better hardware for one once again will help MS, MS has been doing a lot of good things actually since Spencer has become the head honcho, I'd expect that to continue. Neo is a nice upgrade, but Scorpio is gonna be a real beast. 

For me personally I don't really give much a crap about either of their 1st party games. I like Uncharted and Halo is OK I guess, but the rest .... meh. I buy Sony or MS for third party content because they make 95%+ of the worthwhile games on the platform for me. 

Actually my favorite first party game from either one this gen is Killer Instinct (tons of fun). Sunset Overdrive was neat too. 

We may very soon discover if the new xbox will have enough traction... there is no guarantee that they will get all games from EA, if their new console plummet they may lose support, but if it sells good enough and/or it's easy to port from PS counterpart or PC them they will get games. And you gone from MS not allowing themselves to lose because they have a lot of money to a very specific point of not being without 3rd party support.

What hard lesson have they learned? They seem to be doing just the same they always done as a company. And their internal studios are even weaker than they were on X360, 

It wont do native 4k (except for watching videos).

It ll either be 1080 60fps or if games already run that, 1440 60fps, and then upscaled.

Maybe slightly more extras, AA & AF...better quality effects/shadows that sort of thing.

To do native 4k, you would need a much stronger gpu (even than the rumored scorpio).

Yeah I'd much prefer 1440p upscaled or just native and 60FPS than 4k and 30FPS.  

Plus pretty much any open world game should be able to pull off 1080p 60FPS at a minimum. 

I definitely saw a few articles about it but I'm struggling to find one because I'm not technically minded and can't remember what any of the key words were. I'm still looking. I think it was something about how the compute units work but my search is only bringing up recent news of these new consoles. This is what the articles were saying AMD would adopt:

The original AMD GCN architecture allowed for one source of graphics commands, and two sources of compute commands. For PS4, we’ve worked with AMD to increase the limit to 64 sources of compute commands — the idea is if you have some asynchronous compute you want to perform, you put commands in one of these 64 queues, and then there are multiple levels of arbitration in the hardware to determine what runs, how it runs, and when it runs, alongside the graphics that’s in the system.

I'm convinced that Google crippled their search algorithm in a meaningful way. There are certain quotes, articles and discussions that I've had trouble finding within the past few months as well.

WOW, I'm glad someone else noticed. I'e been complaining about this to my son for a couple of years now. I used to be able to find things quickly but now it just fills my search with newer stuff even if it only vaguely resembles what I'm actually looking for. I got an answer on GAF by the way adn it turns out I'm right:

Yes, later GCN revisions (1.2 onwards I think) used the 8 x 8 = 64 compute sources. PS4 was early to that, kind of like Xenos sat between gens.
Makes me wonder, the PS4.5 may look very 480ish, but what Cernyizations are in there?

ME:

Thanks. I'm really not technically minded at all so I didn't have a clue what to search for. Wouldn't the question be: if indeed AMD made those changes internally, would they be available only to chipsets made for Sony or would they be more widely available? Could Sony have patented those changes?

These fall under AMDs new semicustom strategy - Sony may have highlighted the need, but AMD is still doing the bulk of the engineering. Sony has engineers of their own no doubt, but I think anything would be cross-licenced at most (think Toshiba using Cell for whatever, or Xenos being first to unified shaders but ever new GPU after it using them).

Sony gets hardware ahead of current roadmaps out of it, AMD gets part of their R&D funded.

Another answer:

Cerny wanted more engines capable of distributing graphics vs non-graphics work. The idea is essentially getting better utilization and getting closer to the peak performance of the APU. It was no coincidence that the CPU was quite weak so the GPU could also help out with the compute related tasks.

It will also come in play for VR, which is why I've been saying that they will be doubled in Neo/Scorpio.

It does matter if we are trying to calculate Flops...

The way you calculate it is... Number of Cores∗Average frequency∗Operations per cycle

2306*0.911*2 = 4.2 Tflops. (Ps4 Neo Rumoured clock speed which in terms of other specs, has been right so far)

2306*1.2*2 = 5.5 Tflops. (480's clock speed)

Of course, Flops doesn't directly translate to real world performance but if we are trying to use it as a relative unit of measurement, mhz does matter... And sure they could increase the clock speed but it is a lot harder to do due to heating issues than just to add in more ram... Specially if they are aiming for a slim model (Not saying it is going to be slim but if it is...)