Although each new generation of consoles is always more powerful than the last, according to AMD the next ones beyond the current Xbox One, PS4 system will be as much as five times more powerful, per watt of power used. Part of the reason for that jump in power will be to do with the console's newly found focus on virtual reality, something that wasn't close to being at the forefront of developers minds when they designed the current generation of hardware.
AMD should know too, as it's in every single one of the big three console maker's machines right now, and it expects that their successors will also come packing AMD APUs too. It's said that it could supply this hardware to console makers by 2018, which gives us a time frame of between then and 2020 for the consoles to be released.
That about works out, but as WCCFtech points out, this could completely rule out the idea of upgraded hardware being released for current-gen systems, allowing them to have more graphical oomf. This was speculated as a possibility for the PS4, which has its own native VR system in the PlayStation VR set up.
This is perhaps why AMD has been pushing its LiquidVR platform as hard as it can recently, giving it a slight leg-up against Nvidia, which has traditionally provided better performance per watt with its graphical hardware. It will be interesting to see if Nvidia ramps up its VR efforts if indeed the next generation is going to have a strong VR focus.
