| DonFerrari said: Yes consoles are about cost, but not necessarily the cost at launch, they will evaluate the potential total sales for the gen, when those sales shall happen and what estimate cost for each component along gen. |
Most certainly cost at launch.
The Xbox One being a prime example... It could have had the same hardware as the Playstation 4... But Microsoft drew a line in the sand and decided to go with cheaper components in order to push other aspects. (Kinect)
You have a finite budget. - Later on the console manufacturers can make revisions in order to reduce costs and lower the price, which is the natural progression.
Forward sales projections does play a part in some decisions... But estimated generation-long component costs doesn't. Why?
Because they may not use the same component all generation long, quick look at the base Xbox One and Xbox One S show very different components even if they achieve the same effect.
| DonFerrari said: So they may see that one tech that is a little more expensive today during the full gen will be cheaper. |
Some components are more expensive on launch and reduce in price, but allot of the price cutting happens because there are revisions made to the machines themselves, you get new motherboard revisions with changes to capacitor type and layout, smaller, cheaper, more efficient power supplies, new CPU's/GPU's built on a new manufacturing process, even changes in drives and chipsets.
Sometimes these changes are made to bolster reliability.
Newer Playstation 4's have less GDDR5 chips than the launch consoles for example... Sony didn't save money on GDDR5 because they stuck with the exact same Ram and hoped they would drop in price (There was a point where GDDR5 increased in price massively infact), they opted for higher density, but fewer chips in a revision.
| DonFerrari said: Also don't forget that sometimes console makers also make bets. PS4 had the GDDR5 that was a much more costlier solution than X1 had, but only half the capacity. But a good gamble that when prices of GDDR5 were smaller they doubled it. |
To be fair, DDR3 was rising in price at the time, where-as GDDR5 was still relatively new and also high priced, this is where forward projections come in, thanks to GPU's adopting GDDR5 it's actually not a premium commodity anymore.
I also don't think Sony made a "bet". - We knew higher density chips were coming for years, memory manufacturers have roadmaps, Sony being a direct customer would have had more intimate knowledge on that front than even I.
| Intrinsic said: I dont thing using about a quarter of the entire consoles budget for RAM is what I would call cheap. And while it may not have been the fastest GDDR5 ram out there, it was cutting edge for a console in 2013. It was also not even "cheap" back then. Its easy to look at GPUs now pushing an average of 8GB and up and forget that when the PS4 launched there hardly was a GPU on the market that had more than 4GB of GDDR5. |
It was "cheap" in that Sony opted for a unified memory subsystem... Remember the PC has large split memory pools, having 8GB of System Ram and 8GB of GDDR5 like on the PC would have been prohibitively expensive, in short... Impossible for the consoles.
8GB of GDDR5 on any device/component was a relatively new concept back then, but only because nothing needed it at the time.
I mean, you PC had GPU's with 6GB-12GB of GDDR5 before the Playstation 4 launched, but it was a pretty pointless feature to have for gaming, that would have been in conjunction with 16-32GB of System memory on a PC that was equipped to handle such a GPU.
However... It could be argued that the budget that the Playstation 4 spent on Ram and GPU capability came at the expense of CPU, which plays into the "budget" that console manufacturers need to stick to in order to hit price points for a market that is ultimately cost-sensitive.
Microsoft stupidly spent some of it's budget on ESRAM which took up a big % of die-space and came at the expense of the GPU and CPU.
| Intrinsic said: You are quick to point out the limitations of consoles but refuse to recognize their advantages. If sony is making a console today they are not just looking at its price right now but looking at its price over the next 6-10 years. Their are alot of options open to them too being that they are making a proprietary box.
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The price on launch day important. No longer will Sony or Microsoft make a gamble like Sony did with the Playstation 3... And have a stupidly expensive console on launch.
The 8th gen reinforces that fact as they employed more conservative, mid-range hardware on release. (Even the Xbox One X is Mid-range by modern PC comparisons.)
Price in 6-10 years is also a factor, but that is going to happen either-way as revisions are a normal progression of any electronics device which spends a long time on the market, not just to cut costs... But also to bolster reliability.
| Intrinsic said: But going with a HDD is just wrong to me. Its Literally building in obsolescence from day one. |
I think for a console that lacks any optical disk... And is meant for a low price-point... A mechanical drive is probably the way to go.
Mostly because Mechanical drives will still have the advantage in terms of capacity/price over the long haul, especially as next-gen mechanical disk technologies start to ramp up.
For higher end devices like the Xbox One X, we might see a shift to NAND.
| Intrinsic said: Too complicated. They would sooner put in only 500GB of storage in there than do any hybrid stuff. |
Not really. Sony and Microsoft don't have to worry about it, it's all handled by the drive manufacturers at the HDD level.
It's like buying any normal mechanical drive... It's just got extra NAND built-in with firmware built to cache data.
Years ago I had a 32GB SSD used as a cache drive in conjunction with a Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200rpm mechanical disk in the Core 2 Rig... And trust me you knew when the SSD cache drive wasn't functioning.
I was also an early adopter of SSD's as well... I jumped onboard the SSD train when the OCZ Vertex 2 64GB drives was new and fresh on the market back in circa 2011~... But I also run an array of mechanical disks because NAND just doesn't offer the capacities of spinning rust at the right price just yet.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
