I think it's going to be a bit more beefy with the components like GFX card, fans, etc.
I disagree. Have you seen inside a launch PS3? The majority of the bulk was taken up by the power supply, Blu Ray drive and the cooling fan.
Things, as in chip manufacturing processes and power efficiency, have moved on greatly since 2006; the PS3 Slim and Super Slim are proof of that: They're smaller, consume less power and produce less heat as a result meaning the power supply and cooling arrangement are more compact.
About the processors: The PS3 used the Cell processor, it was the first production application of that particular chip, so it was still very young when the PS3 launched with room for improvements to the power efficiency and die size. According to
Wikipedia, the PS3's power supply started off at 380W and finished up at 190W, the GPU and CPU 'process' (let's just say 'size') started at 90nm and finished up at 40/45nm. So the power requirement and processor die size shrank considerably over the PS3's lifespan, as we know.
Edit: Apologies, the power supply ratings aren't particularly helpful when it comes to the
actual power consumption of the processors. Wikipedia says the power consumption while idling at the XMB menu varies from 171-176W for the launch model to 58W for the Super Slim, and in-game (using Final Fantasy XIII as a benchmark) it's between 195-209W for the launch and around 70 for the Super Slim. Still massive improvements, though!
The PS4, on the other hand, is rumoured to be using
AMD's Jaguar architecture which is an evolution of their pre-existing Bobcat, it's an architecture for a low power APU (accelerated processing unit). According to that link, each Jaguar core is manufactured with a 28nm process and each will be 3.1mm^2. Of course that doesn't mean the CPU in the PS4 will simply be the exact size of eight 3.1mm^2 cores, but it's still pretty small! The 'low power' part is key, too, I don't know how low it'll be exactly but if the thing is intended to be AMD's low power APU then I imagine it'll be, well, low. It's safe to say the GPU will be similarly-specced otherwise the CPU may present something of a bottleneck, but it's worth pointing out that the GPU isn't a pure GPU, it'll be a GPGPU in a similar vein to Nvidia's CUDA architecture so it can be used like a CPU for some tasks, meaning the CPU might not be as much of a bottleneck as you may expect.
Aaaaanyway, that's going off on a tangent. Just by comparing the power requirements alone you can see why the PS3 ended up so small compared to how it started; lower power means less heat (and less heat means smaller cooling apparatus) and a smaller PSU. If the PS4 is using low-power processors which are already at a small process size it's a sure thing that the power requirements will be significantly lower than the launch PS3's.
Combine that with an even smaller Blu Ray drive (which is likely, as they put them in laptops now)... It's very unlikely that the PS4 will be as big as the launch PS3.
even bigger than firs Xbox.
But i wouldn't mind for PS4 to be same size as PSX, no not the PSone but this Japanese PSX, that thing was huge.
