It will be interesting to see how the Switch 2 holds up when we'll be getting 32GB+ consoles next gen, ofcourse the cross gen period will help as you've mentioned. What will also help is the fact that they dont do feature parity with much more powerful hardware and have a dedicated SDK and devkit for the system so it wont be a pain for devs. What I was saying is if Xbox releases a handheld where they require feature parity with a next gen system then they'll be in a world of pain just like today with the Series S.
If we follow this regression, DRAM prices drop by 5% YoY.
So to keep the same prices today but to double the DRAM would require the following:
Basically inverse principal interest, or rather principal decay formula:
It will take approximately 13.5 years for $100 to decrease to $50 with a 5% annual reduction.
That's when they can keep the same price point but double the memory to 32GB.
This generation released in 2020, so we are looking at 2033/34 approximately to get to 32GB of memory if we want to hold the 499 price point.
Flash storage however will gain double the storage every 3 years for the same price point. The 2TB is overpriced today in theory. By 5 years it should be 1/4 the price we paid in 2020. And 8.8 years to be 1/10th the amount we paid, so by next gen (2028) flash memory could be nearly 10x greater with the same amount of $ used on storage today.
We can probably leverage the savings in the storage to help increase the DRAM pool here by next gen.
So assume next generation is 2028.
DRAM prices will be down 34% from 2020.
Storage prices are down 88% from 2020.
It's possible that 32GB is in the cards, but all of those savings would mean the console is stuck at 1TB in 2028.
We haven't accounted for silicon prices and cooling that silicon however.
To double the power of todays consoles (actually double, not double submission) we need to move from 15.4B transistors to 30B transistors approximately, possibly more. If the cost per transistor doesn't come down (lets say it has marginal decreases in cost), you're basically doubling the cost of the chip here.
So we need to ensure some of those storage savings also need to cover the cost of silicon increases, and we haven't yet touched on cooling yet, or the fact that more transistors will naturally require more bandwidth, so having 32GB of DRAM combined with doubling the bandwidth will mean significantly costs, essentially 16 chips of 2GB which is a 512-bit bus.