[citation][nom]leongrado[/nom]I wonder why they're going to have 8 cores. Are they predicting games to use that much more cpu in the future? I have an i5 quad core right now and cpu has never been a bottleneck. What do you guys think. Is this just another reason for them to charge us more for the system or are games really going to require that much more professing power?[/citation]
Games are massively parallel, with a lot of very different things all going on at once (audio, video, AI, physics, social services, OS services, etc., and each of these things can be comprised of many threads). Having more CPU cores helps give game designers more ways to distribute the load so that they can make more complex games.
The 2 huge things that consoles hold back the industry on (I am talking game design, not graphical output which can be cured by even a moderate GPU) are AI which are all dumb as a box of rocks, and map design. Throwing in massive amounts of memory, and a bunch of cores will help those 2 things a great deal as we can have much larger/more interesting maps, and then have AI that could actually make a decision further than "find user, run at user while shooting or hide behind chest-high wall, stop at boundary".
I would love to play games where the AI has more of a real person's reaction in being less predictable, and using more of the options available to them. And maps need to get more interesting, more layered/tiered, bigger, with more interesting boundaries, and more interaction/destructability that current consoles simply cannot do nicely. PCs have the ability to do this, but games are designed for console, so the lowest common denominator determines gaming for all.
Besides, these next consoles need to last 8-10 years, and will not be released until Christmas of 2013. While quad core CPUs will still be the norm for the next 2 years, we will start to see 8+core CPUs come out with SkyLake/SkyMont processors in ~2015. So the consoles will be ahead of the curve on core count (granted with a slower CPU) for a year, and then be left in the dust for the remaining 6-9 years of it's life-cycle.
Something they are not saying is that these may possibly be the last gen of traditional 'gaming consoles' as network speeds increase dramatically and server based gaming gets better and better. In 10 years I fully expect a new console, but I expect it to be a cheap $50 or free box that forces you into a monthly contract to stream your game content rather than a traditional machine that does any real local processing.