I say "supposedly" because it's Kotaku. I say Kotaku in a mocking tone because they are shit reporters. 8GBs of GDDR5 as system memory sounds insane, I'm guessing Kotaku didn't bother following up on their source because if they're estimating 8GBs I'm assuming that absolutely has to be DDR3 for cost reasons. The 4GBs from most other reports seems far more likely to me.
I suggest the Eurogamer write up, even though they're the shit reporters that start the Borderlands 2 "Girlfriend Mode" quote nonsense by purposefully misquoting in their headline to draw in more readers. They were spot on in their Wii U specs and don't appear to be staffed by a bunch of monkeys, or at least not a group of monkeys as stupid as the ones at Kotaku.
If they're going with Bulldozer arcitecture I'm going to have to slap a bitch, but I guess it's cheaper now that Piledriver has launched. I'd also like to think the setup mentioned in Kotaku's artilce, a quartet of dual cores instead of one 8 core shoehorned into a mobile chipset not meant to support it, is the route they're actually going. Thoughts? Comments? Random hate for Kotaku? Please share.
Still probably going to be priced at 800$ and perform like a 600-700$ custom rig
What i do love however is how this looks more like a Pc than a Gaming Console Components wise, hopefully that will mean better ports for the games developed for consoles.
Actually you've got it backwards, consoles normally perform like a more expensive rig than their price point. So, if it was an $800 console, I'd expect it to perform on par with a current $1200 rig, simply because it doesn't have a massive opperating system lurking in the background and is designed to be a vastly more effecient machine all around - they're supposedly still shooting for the sub 200W mark, which no gaming PC could hope to match. The problem with consoles is that they're fixed, they can't be upgraded or added to. Like Apple products, but less douchey and pretentious. I expect next gen consoles to perform comparably to high-end gaming focused PCs, but then obviously taper off over time in comparison to that relative high water mark in PC tech. So while it may compare initially to a $1200 rig, it won't compare to a $1200 rig from 3 years later, or even an upgraded - lets say added SLI GPU - $1200 rig from when it launched.
Prices are, of course, relative to this example only since we don't know where they'll be launching at.
So what does this all mean? If what eurogamer says is right it sounds impressive. So would the system be equivalent to an I5 3570K and a 7970? Or what would it be equivalent to?
I don't know enough to gestimate based on those specs, but I'd assume they're shooting for something just a tiny smidge higher than the 3570K in terms of game performance. It's hard to estimate though, as they do a whole bunch of tweaking behind the scenes to make these compents dump more effort into gaming than they would in any other setting. They could also be cutting back in favor of a more palatable pricing model.
i bought my pc for just over 1100, 7950 and a 3570k, my 7950 destroys a 7970m let alone a slightly weaker version, and my 3570k is going to compete with a 1.6Ghz low power laptop processor, theres no way it will perform even close to a 1200 rig, even something like a fx 6300 and a 7870 which in a decent rig runs about 700$ would beat that.