Honestly, the hardware manufacturers do a pretty darn good job of letting Devs know what's coming down the pipe. If you think about it, Intel and AMD both know that gamers buy the first hot-stuff machines off the assembly lines.

They know full-well that devs need to be thinking about those features long before they exist. In fact, even the smallest 2-man studios are often comp'd motherboards and CPUs in even the earliest days of development, in hopes that every dev is using the power as early as possible. This is true not only for CPUs and motherboards, but graphics cards, sound cards, and even keyboards and mice!

Also, understand that development of hardware is far in advance of what is actually on the shelf. Typically R&D in these big companies is four or more years ahead of the assembly line, so there are rarely any suprises for anyone.

In 2001, we knew we'd have 3+ gHz processors, and multi-core + hyperthreading. We also knew where graphics cards would be and bus speed, AND the size of hard drives and popularity of DVD as a distribution medium. We've had suprises on the video RAM front (games still want faster RAM instead of more of it) and when DX10 would ship (don't ask...heh) to help out our CPU load.

Hardware vendors are very good to us, and actually quite predictable. *grin*