or five?

I'll raise you a VII.

I want it to start 2014

I find it a little strange that people seem to be wishing for a later generational change when it looks like a lot of the people here were already late to this generation by one or two years. So if the same happens again some of the people stating 2013 might be looking at 2015 or so before even considering changing console hardware. Even if the console hardware comes in 2011/2012 a lot of people here will still wait for the games to be produced and the price to come down before they switch.

Personally I wonder if the generation change comes too late then a lot of the opportunities to improve the gameplay and experience of the consoles would have been wasted. I consider this hardware generation to be a half-step towards the true fleshing out of the experiences teased at with this generation of hardware. It feels like this generation of hardware has an 'almost there but not quite' thing going on. The hardware isn't quite powerful enough to give us the best experience at 720P with up to 4 players and at minimum with technologies like 3D and new interfaces not really fitting into what the current best architecture can offer us. 

What I want is for console hardware to truely own the whole spectrum of the experience we as the end users would want. I want console hardware which can give 60FPS at 1080P without aliasing issues along with both 3D and next generation interfaces which only hindsight on the strength and weaknesses of the Wii can bring. I feel that if we wait until 2013 for these experiences to start to emerge then we are simply delaying where our gaming passion has to end up. 

With another hardware/software/interface change of this magnitude again it makes sense to have more expensive next gen hardware co-existing with cheaper current generation hardware to allow the game developers time to develop the systems and techniques to ease the transition. What I want is an emissary like the current generation Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 paved the way and I am thankful for it as my early experiences on the PS3 would have been unpleasant if it wasn't for Microsoft paving the way. So again I want an emissary in an early next generation console release to give the early adopters time to flesh out the systems before the rest of us migrate across whether they be developers or consumers. 

Its not going to be another painful transition to a new generation. The art assets being created now would look great on a next generation system. I don't think that anything from Uncharted 2 or any other AAA game would look out of place on a system using next generation hardware rendering at 1080P and 60FPS in 3D. Infact it would probably be cheaper as the artists would have to spend less time tweaking the assets to fit the limitations of the current systems.

I tend to think of the Xbox 360 as the emissary for the current generation and I feel that Microsoft should play that role again as they are in the best position to lay down the framework of the next generation hardware as they are in the best position to judge the direction of the industry as they are in constant dialogue with AMD, Nvidia and Intel whom are the performance drivers in the computing industry at present. Further to this they seem to create excellent tools that really engage with the developers.

For the next generation hardware I worked out that at 32nm there would be roughly 1 billion transistors per 100mm^2 and a single die combining both CPU and GPU at 250mm^2 would give about 2.5B transistors or roughly 5* the present Xbox 360s total. Of this I feel an allocation of 600M transistors on an on die framebuffer/ROP/3D array would yield about 36MB of storage or enough to store one 1920 by 1080 by FP16 framebuffer and allow them to spit out a 2nd 3D version cheaply. The rest can be divided between the GPU/CPU and it doesn't really matter how it gets done. Probably the only other thing would be to improve the single threaded performance as per Amdahl's which states that the speed up of parellel processing is limited by the time it takes to execute the most serial instructions. So I would have to say that out of order execution may be on the menu.

Sorry I got carried away!  

Autumn 2013 would be 7 years for the majority of competitors and for market leader too, so it's the most suitable year, IMVHO.
BTW a console is not designed and developed in one year, a console to be released in 2013 should already be under development now, it's only official definitive specs that are released later, first to developers, then, last, to the public.

I believe they should come out in late 2012 or early 2013, but i wouldnt mind fall 2013 i would expect it no later than 2014 if later then something is wrong.

Next year the PC will blow away the 2005 tech of the consoles.

@rudyrsr8:
Something wrong could have already happened: the crisis we're coming out of now already shifted a lot of games releases, that are almost flooding us now and will next year too, it could have shifted HW releases too.

I want 2010 but that's unreasonable. So next gen to start in Nov 2011 would be more realistic and that's what I mainly hope for.

I believe next gen will start in Nov 2012 though with Xbox 3.