One question; are you high?
1) 16 core CPUs aren't out in any real way. To include one in the next Xbox would be costly, not to mention a very substantial (physical die size) chunk of silicon.
2) We all want multi-threaded applications, but when 4 is still a hard to use number why in Hades would Microsoft introduce quadruple that? It doesn't make sense to give developers power that they will never get to use...
3) Why work with an IBM Power PC core? AMD has developed and proven the APU concept. Not utilizing the APUs decreased cost and complexity means MS is going to throw money away. The accountants on the dev. team would never allow that to happen, not even considering how much easier an APU would be for the fabricators and designers.
And the biggest point of all:
4) MS is not stupid; well, not that kind of stupid. A 10+ year console is not possible, without taking a financial bath for nearly half a decade. As this will not happen again, thanks in no small part to the PS3 drama, MS isn't going with a 16 core CPU. Put simply, the idea is bad on paper. I wish it was true, but MS wouldn't waste money on something that isn't likely to have a decent return on investment. Maybe the 1080 will have a 16 core processor in 6 years...
For starters, I never said I thought this was true, only that it was a rumor worth posting and discussing since it's an interesting twist on things. As for your objections, I have some possible responses;
1. IBM has a lot of experimental tech that would make a 16-Core CPU a reality, but it is a very ambitious number. I was just thinking it may even be something like Bulldozer, where it's 2/4/8 cores split up with shared resources. That would cut costs and allow them to make a CPU with a high number of cores that is easy to work with (unlike Cell). And 16-Core CPU's do exist, just not to consumers, and not in the traditional sense. I have heard reports of Cell-esque CPU's with upwards of 64-Cores.
2. I wouldn't say 4 is hard to use, but when a good number of people still use Dual-Core's, why offer such heavy threading? It would definitely pave the way for PC Games to be more heavily threaded when they are just console ports.
3. AMD has proven APU's, but IBM has also been doing the same thing for longer. They just weren't hyping it up as revolutionary products. IBM made the SOC that is in the newest revisions of the Xbox 360, which featured the CPU, GPU, and more on a single die, so they are definitely capable of doing things just as well as AMD, but they have a major advantage--they can actually manufacture on a large scale. AMD will alwas be hindered by 3rd party foundries, but IBM owns its own foundries, and can handle everything themselves.
4. These companies want to push console life cycles as long as they can, nobody expected a 7-8 year life cycle on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but here we are
, mainly cause it's going to be released this year
(Hopefully
) and I'm curious to see what it's capable of