We all know that famous Star Wars line..."the circle is complete".  Remember way back when, consoles were sub-par substitutes for PCs, ie Apple II, IBM, etc. Companies like Atari, and later the 1st big three jumped at the chance to make $$ off users of cheaper consoles as users wanted to pay less. 

Now that the consoles are such powerhouses, I believe that the future may indeed hold a circle is complete notion-that is, as consoles near equal status to everyday PCs, multi-core, high RAM, exteme grafx.

In addition, I know everybody knows about this in some respect but thinlk about this: we are currently approaching the limits of Moore's Law in console/PC chips.  Nanotechnology will play a role in this circle's last segmant--I guarantee it.

When consoles come out, they'll have power close to PC's. However, with the ever increasing advances in hardware and the potential of upgrading PC's while consoles are on fixed hardware configurations (in terms of CPU, GPU, ect), consoles will get left in the dust soon after they launch.

Also, there was another thread about the Moore's law thing. If I recall, people seemed to agree that other methods of technological advancement would be utalized and that would further bring about new changes.

The huge movement towards parallelism should keep moore's law alive for a bit longer.

@Paladin Yeah, I know. Consoles are starting to be PCs already, browsing, saving games to HDD, even PS3 printing. Consoles need to be "opened up" so to speak. Their cyclical limitations upon gen release are a hindrance to the end user. Now if they would allow someting like customizable inserts, PCI-like? Buy some propietary RAM, etc. at GS, walmart, etc and just insert them PS3-HDD like into the console.

The problem is that consoles are like that so you don't have to go through having to build and manage the parts yourself. Entertainment in the living room and a general ease of use compared to a computer operating system and the ability to play tons of games is the whole reason of having the consoles.

If you could change out hardware in your console, then things would get sticky. Not to mention the consoles and their software are built around their usually specially designed hardware.

You may think what you want of consoles but a standard 1000$ computer will most likely run an algorithm on a large collection of data faster than a PS3 or Xbox. Consoles are terrible work environment and that's why they remain in the living room. Also, did you know that Moore's Law isn't everything. It's about the hardware capabilities. However, you need engineers to create an optimized OS that can really use the power we have. So far, the OS on the market suck and we're far from getting what we could really get.

@Godot What should be the standard then? A unified architecture for both PCs and consoles? Also, what kind of OS would you propose to solve the optimization problem of typical OSs. You bring up valid points.

Here's something you make be interested to look at. It's something our professor showed us on our first course of Embedded systems.

The blue line is the Standard Moore law and the red line is what the engineers can work on. As years passed, the gap between what our technology allow us to do and what we can do with the resources we have as increased. We are seeing that problem in a way in gaming as well. For example, the PS3 is capable of awesome things in theory but it would cost so much man hour to really (and I mean really unlike anything that is done right now) push the hardware that it's won't be done.

My computer is a dual core and sometimes it lags on Vista. There's a lot of work that remains to be done before we can really reach a limit where we can't push the computers anymore.

To answer your questions, I'd say that the big advantage of console is that the hardware is unique. One of the big problems of Microsoft's OS is that they run on everything from a Macbook Pro to Toshiba computer and what not. What will the future bring is actually more uniformity. In the future, computers will be used mostly for work-related activities. Mobile phones, video games console and other devies will take a bigger place in our lives.

It amuses me that the example you chose to tell us a PC would be better at than a console corresponds EXACTLY to the strengths of the Cell (and other SIMD multiprocessors)...

As in, the Cell would have a very good chance to outperform any $1000 x86 PC at running an algorithm on a large collection of data simply because that is what the processor was built for...

There is only one problem with this theory. The Wii has taken a sharp turn back to what consoles used to be. It is not a super powered graphics beast designed to push the latest and greatest in graphics, physics, AI, etc. It is a simple machine meant to be an easy way to get into gaming. Given the massive success of the Wii I will bet the indstry follows this tangent rather than circling back to being a watered down PC.