I don't think the Neo is going to be as expensive to make as some may think, mainly because judging by AMD's specs they're actually clocking these chips faster and not adding a tonne of extra Compute Units. The more efficient nature of Polaris means that the chips can be clocked faster, while still using ridiculously low amounts of power and producing some very nice end performance.
The 14 compute unit R7 460X, clocked at 1400MHz produces 2.5TFlops, but it only uses 50 watts.
If Sony's target is to hit 4.190TFlops as the rumors say, then they don't need 36 compute units a 24 compute unit GPU, clocked at 1400mhz would net Sony 4.293TFlops and the GPU would only use around 85 watts, I think the original 18CU GPU only used about 90 watts anyway.
This way Sony gets all of the performance they need, but costs can be kept down considerably.
I see no reason why the CPU can't be clocked faster easier than the rumors suggest, it's a part of the SoC/APU and at 14nm there's definite headroom to clock much faster than the original 8 Core AMD Jaguar CPU allowed. Even Puma at 28nm could be clocked at 2.4GHz on the same 30 watts of power consumption Jaguar used.
Puma scaled down to 14nm could run at 4.8GHz on 30 watts, so it's 3X faster than Jaguar, if Sony wanted a 3.6GHz Puma then they could get away with only using 20 watts.
I doubt PS4 Neo would even need to cost $399, I'd expect that kind of pricing if Sony were using a bigger GPU core, but that just isn't needed with Polaris, we're talking about a GPU 50% smaller than what was originally rumored, so costs should reflect that.
Neo could be $349, with the launch PS4 being dropped down to $249, this give Sony the ability to say that Neo only costs $100 more, but gives new owners more than 2X the performance of the original launch PS4, making it seem like a no brainer for new owners to buy Neo over the OG PS4.
I don't think we'll see a slim PS4, because Neo will be enough for Sony to have to market on top of Playstation VR, tbh I'd be surprised if even Neo was really coming this year, as much as the tech exists to make it real and there's a lot of buzz in the media about it, it's still unprecedented from a console platform holder to release a beefed up version of your already legendary selling platform.
Anyway if Neo is real, then I think it's not going to be any more than $399 for sure, could be as low as $349, there may not be a slim model, but rather the OG PS4 will go down to an official $249.
With all of the new games coming to PS4 this is how Sony spikes the PS4 sales even harder and also moves a tonne of games from exclusives through to multiplats.
The point of a games console is to sell games and this also makes the barrier to getting PS VR much slimmer, so maybe Sony will lean on that fact a little too.
