Dev wrote on Aug 18, 2012, 11:50:

eRe4s3r wrote on Aug 18, 2012, 02:23:
Well with custom I mean like a dual-gpu kind of setup. Actually I am bit more optimistic that at least 1 of the new consoles is going to be pretty state-of-the-art performance wise given that the costs are recouped by games anyway. And hopefully the consoles are going to be 64bit, meaning we might finally see that leak over into the PC market, one can hope... ;p It annoys the heck of out of me no game uses my 16GB ram ;p I could INSTALL most games in my ram, for gods sake.

There's existing dual gpu on a single card setups now. In most cases, duals on 1 card aren't cost effective for the amount of performance they give out.
No, costs are NOT automatically recouped by games. Sony lost a HUGE amount of money on the PS3 console. I didn't run the math of each quarter/annual report to see if they ever made enough money to make up for those losses.
I have run the math on the xbox 1 though. MS lost over $4 billion on the xbox 1, and thats INCLUDING all games/software/licensing sales they made on it. I believe they ultimately made money overall on the xbox 360, but it took quite a while to even be in the black for a single quarter (which I recall was when they released one of the halo games), and then even longer to make up for all the previous losses.

And 64 bit isn't really that important to consoles. The 360 has been running on 512 megs ram. They may well limit the next gen consoles to 4gb of memory to keep costs down. And even if they did go to 8 gb of ram, there's ways to utilize that in 32 bit. Some versions of windows have also been able to use over 4gb of ram in 32 bit.