Impressive impressions there, mister.
Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter sits among the crowd of people who are impressed with the PlayStation 4 specs. Geoff Keighley has tweeted an image of a slide from the SXSW panel that boasts Sony's upcoming hardware in every way imaginable. Pachter marked the high-quality RAM as a platform for innovation, and the CPU as a tool for multimedia improvements. Put simply, he thinks the "PS4 is impressive"—that Killzone 4 trailer must have really affected him in the right way.
While the 8-core CPU is around what many expected from the next-gen, the 8GB of GDDR5 memory and powerful discrete graphics card aren't. From a PC gamer perspective it's hard to see how it'll retail for anything that can be classified as affordable, but Sony has assured us that it'll be sold for a reasonable price. If so, it'll be hard to beat.
Unfortunately, for Nintendo the news of the PlayStation 4's "super-charged" specs have completely shrouded its latest console. Everyone expected the Wii U to be the least powerful of next-gen consoles, but not by this large of a margin. Furthermore, Pachter expects the Wii U to sell around 30 million units during its lifetime, as opposed to the 90 million he predicts for the PlayStation 4. When you consider that the Wii U will be undoubtedly the less costly solution, and had a one-year head-start, the prediction is alarming.
If there's one thing to take out of this whole situation, it's that Sony should never be counted out. It appears to have an extremely competitive device with the PS4, and if it manages to have a sound launch—which is more difficult than you'd imagine—then Pachter's predictions are likely to ring true.
