Consoles all have a fixed life time, I'm not sure if you remember that before the 360 was the Xbox. It's not like Sony just came out with a Playstation 3 and not release 2 previous PlayStations.
Of course the WiiU is more powerful, it's newer tech. Does it look it at the moment? Not really because optimization has to take place and we have no idea about the finalised spec. The very early builds had a 4870 GPU and an IBM CPU, from rumours these specs have increased. The rumours of the WiiU being terribly underpowered compared to PS3 and 360 are clearly false. The reasons behind this are clearly obvious, we are having two seperate stories being told, and this rumour of it being weak is coming from an unamed developer, where as praise is coming from well known developers such as: Team Ninja, Crytek and Epic just to name a few.
The dissapointing thing is that news sites like IGN and Eurogamer are just presenting this as news, they are just being blog sites. They're traffice whores that well by presenting an article with slightly misleading title will deffinetely gather in a large amount of hits.
You guys need to visit news sites that are like editorials, I prefer CVG. They offer their own insight to what they believe is right or wrong and will explicitly say it. Other news sites have tidbits here and there however that is mainly because of the troll baiting articles that were published before hand.
As on the terms of new consoles, back in 2011 everyone was saying we have 5 more years of these consoles before the new ones come out. Now everyone is saying we need new consoles next year. The truth is, no one is ready for a new console other than Nintendo. I've said this numerous times and people seem to forget that Sony and Microsoft do other things than just games consoles.
Let me talk about Microsoft first, at the moment they are hammered, anyone who thought they would talk about a new console this year was seriously being stupid. They currently have a major workload for themselves. If you don't remember, at the end of last year the new metro dashboard was released, that positioned the Xbox 360 as an entertainment device. This was under the one UI plan that microsoft rolled out in 2011 for Phone, Xbox and Windows.
With the UI established MS is hard at work on at least 4 projects to be released at the end of the year, these are: Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Microsoft Office 15 (Office 2013) and Windows Phone 8 (Apollo), these are expected to hit at the end of this year and are heavily focussed in this area. Other projects include migrating the whole Zune brand into Xbox Music and Xbox Video, Skydrive and Windows Asure.
On the gaming side, the announcement of a new console could remove the importance of Halo 4.
What we do know is the NextBox is expected to be backwards compatible, this from rumours that Microsoft's high end programmers, people behind the NTFS format (which windows ueses) and I forget this persons name but they are the person that advised Windows to use the x86_x64 architecture from AMD than to use the Itanium architecture from intel for 64 bit computing and was responsible for allowing x86 32 bit programs to run on x86_x64, have moved from the Windows division to the Xbox division.
There are again two possible reasons behind this:
1. They are working on the architecture level to support emulation for the PowerPC based Xbox 360 games, as MS moves from PowerPC to an AMD platform. So archetectural level work on the next console has probably been started.
2. There's a grim story that many of the highend Microsoft employees (the people that actually changed the world of computing in the past 10 years (2004 ish) believe it or not) are joining Xbox division to avoid the Sinfoskisation of Microsoft, which I hope isn't true.
Specs are up in the air, however I would like to point out a rumour about the nextbox having two GPUs. This is possible but not in the sense that people are thinking. Knowing from rumours that Microsoft is switching to AMD, it's possible that they will use an APU, which has a CPU and a descrete level GPU on the same die. Other rumours suggested that the NextBox will use a mid range GPU, a 6670. What mosts gaming sites don't understand is PC gaming, and if they did they would peice these three or four claims to actually find out what actually is going on for the nextbox.
An APU is good enough for gaming, consoles don't really run at 720p and most people sit quite a fair bit away from the screen to even realise the difference. I'm a PC gamer and I only care about it being 1920X1200 when it's a PC game, console games I really don't care that much.
With PC gaming you can pair up two identical GPUs for SLI (Nvidia) or Crossfire(AMD), to in theory double your performance (never double, its around 70%-80%).
With an APU you can pair it up with a X670 (x denotes generation number, ie 6670 for 2011 or 7670 for 2012 gpu) and run it in "Crossfire", so you have two GPUs working. This is very cost effective and low power solution that does give you decent gaming performance, on a PC. PC gaming is always innificient when compared to consoles so by optizamation it could really stand out.
On the Playstation side, it pretty much is the same side. Both MS and Sony are expected to use an off the shelf processor and gpu. However Sony is busy too by restructuring the company under the One Sony innitiative.
So there's an insight to what is actually going on with the nextgeneration of consoles, if anything at the moment in time. Also remember R&D never stops, its always continous at these companies.
