I find it quite amusing that most of the talk here focuses on numbers and not on needs. The only "wants" on the last 10 pages were those listed by Laa-Yosh (#7850) and "make audio cheaper" mentioned by bkilian on the previous page. But "wants" is what companies (well, MS at least) focus on when designing the next HW/SW. Expecting next-gen consoles to be designed by numbers is expecting disaster IMO. And "wants" are partially the next big things developers request, want to focus on or implement in order to differentiate their product. "Gimme more powah!" is not the way I would express my needs if I were them.
So here's a short list of things I believe are important if we want next-gen to deliver better experiences and not just more pixels.
- programmable AA as part of the graphics pipeline: something like hull shader that would run on unified shader cores but would be designed for AA calculations
- some sort of advanced support for advanced skinning and animation blending (probably in GPU; would more consts/variables be enough? are new data primitives required?)
- better support for transparency (order-independent transparency support from HW?)
- better support for SxS graphics rendering and GPGPU processing to enable e.g. advanced physics on GPU
- better support for data streaming (finer control over the way data is cashed/saved on hard drive? new optical media format optimized for out-of-order data streaming?)
- dedicated hardware for stuff, that's cheaper if not made generic, after all there's a reason why texturing uses dedicated silicon and hasn't been made general purpose
(audio and video decoding, audio processing, cryptography, secure storage, etc.)
- support for dynamic resolution scaling and support for 60FPS/dual-image (3D) rendering
There's also need for advanced lighting (HDR, indirect lighting, caustics, etc.), improved connectivity, TV support, image analysis (think: Kinect), destructibility and object deformation and many more. Some of these things (and some of the stuff above) could be running on generic HW assuming that platform holder provides necessary libraries and CPU/GPU/memory/bandwidth load is predictable, but in many cases dedicated hardware seems like a better option. These are things that would drive the design of "my" console.