Ive been investigating pushing the envelope on computer games (well beyond current crop of games) and since consoles play a large part in todays game market, I am seeking info about what kind of performance we can expect in the future from new consoles.

Some of the features Im looking at call for more than just high Graphics capabilities, but consoles that will be able to match the high end PCs technology (as PCs continue to move forward also - and what level the console makers will set as their target).

Now this deals with several years off so that new consoles would have a chance to enter into common use by that time (will even that be a problem if current consoles are 'sufficient' and there will have to be many new games first developed for large numbers of players to bother to buy higher performance replacement consoles...).

OK thanks. I will keep an eye out for those coming details.

I dont doubt that they try to keep the specs under wraps to hold off apple-orange comparisons.

Looked at the WiiU specs and saw the extra EDRAM (good) but only 2GB RAM(so-so) , but then the GPU is usually the ruling factor for so many games anyway (little details there).

CPU in Wii U looks archaic though, 3 cores of a revamped GameCube CPU.

It is weird that half of the memory is dedicated to the OS. If the architectures of both Wii and Wii U are so similar, and the previous OS worked on a very limited amount of memory, why the sudden jump? They added a massive new infrastructure?

Maybe they just gave themselves a lot of headroom for new features...

We won't have anything approaching hard numbers until the details of the GPUs are revealed, and until we have benchmarks for AMD's next-gen low-power CPU, Jaguar, which powers both the PS4 and Xbox Next if rumors are to be believed. Both consoles are rumored to sport 2 4-core modules, and AMD will release quad-core modules for use in PCs, so CPU performance will be roughly double that. Reported clock speeds are 1.6 Ghz, but it remains to be seen whether CPU cores will be allowed to "turbo" like the PC versions are, that should enable up to 50% more performance, but perhaps on only 2 of the 8 cores to achieve highest turbo. With 128bit SIMD, aggregate floating point performance should be a little over 100Gflops (figure around 20% more over short bursts if turbo is enabled), so its comparable to a fast, high-end CPU (like an i7), but because its spread across 8 CPUs you'll have to work harder to extract that performance.

GPU-wise, the rumors are that they will be similar in capability and performance to Radeon 7770 or 7830, but, of course there's minimal interference between game and hardware in a console, not to mention any special additions they've made, so its once again hard to say until we know more. And also consoles can get away with less need for MSAA, et all, and don't have to deal with resolutions higher than 1080p, so while they may have fewer shader units than a high-end graphics card, they get to spread them across fewer pixels in general.