Regular Xbox games don't benefit of course, but it becomes possible to play arcade games based on the Sega Chihiro platform (an Xbox derivative with 128mb RAM)
As I said in another comment, those numbers are a bit off. The PS2 had 36 MB of RAM (32 main, 4 graphics), and the Gamecube had 43 MB (24 main, 16 audio, 3 graphics). In any case, much less than the Xbox.
At least in the PS5, the ultra-fast SSD and some technology around it are supposed to drastically reduce the need to keep things in RAM in case they are needed quickly later. There's a talk about that and other PS5 innovations by Mark Czerny. It's a very high quality talk.
> This last one also surprises me, was expecting at least 32GB
Well the GPU is comparable to 8GB models, so I can see why 16GB would work fine. You don't need that much space for game state.
Though looking into the Series X more, they sure set up the ram weirdly. There are 4 1GB memory chips and 6 2GB chips. This gives it 10GB of very fast memory, and 6GB of somewhat fast memory. The operating system reserves 2.5GB of the somewhat fast memory, and games get 13.5GB
The 'natural' setup would be 20GB, and they didn't even go that high, so they must be plenty confident that 32GB is well beyond what they need.
While I have no insider knowledge here, weird memory architectures like that are often a cost measure. The XBox 360 had a small block of super-fast memory alongside its huge block of slower memory (the super-fast memory was used for framebuffers, among other things) and there have been occasional PC video card releases that had weird tiered memory architectures as well - I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.
> While I have no insider knowledge here, weird memory architectures like that are often a cost measure.
It depends on what you're comparing to. It costs more than having 8x2GB, but costs less than 10x2GB.
> I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.
Well there was the fiasco that was the GTX 970, because one chunk of memory was one seventh as fast as the rest. Plus a couple other quirky models. This move should be much easier to deal with, and making developers deal with it is the kind of thing a console can do much more easily than PC hardware.
