8 threads and 4 big cores seems like both a reasonable power boost to me and more in line with trying to produce an APU for a $399 price point, would be very happy to be proved wrong as I think having a lot of CPU power would open up more space for playing with voxels, AI, procedural generation, etc.
A thing I've been thinking about lately is the potential for "free" performance boosts in the memory controller and the like by using the same hacks that were exposed by the Spectre and Meltdown bugs. IIRC they were largely caused by the memory controller in certain AMD, ARM and most every Intel design of the past decade or so not performing boundary checks when doing speculative loads (recently this behaviour has been shown in speculative stores too) which allowed the attackers to force the unsafe loading of protected memory areas. Would there be any advantage to Sony or MS is specifying this unsafe behaviour for their consoles? As devices with pretty strong protections against arbitrary code being run anyway the odds of the attacks being used successfully are considerably lower than with the PC Spectre/Meltdown attacks which largely relied on adjacent attacker controlled VMs running the attack code to compromise other VMs on the same device (there were browser based JScript attacks but simply disallowing high precision timers and adding jitter closed that vector). Or is it more likely that they would be afraid that in the event of a future attack that allowed arbitrary code to be run Spectre/Meltdown could be used to extract root keys from RAM?
