The Cell was 235.48mm2 and the GPU was even larger at 258mm2. The GPU was larger than the Cell and thus likely more expensive to manufacture and thus your assertion that the PS3 costs were high due to the cell is highly incorrect.
Both chips were fairly conservative in terms of size... But having two moderately sized chips is still expensive.

The Radeon x1900 XTX for instance was a *big* 352 mm2 at the same node and nVidia took it a step farther with the Geforce 8800 Ultra at a whopping 484mm2.

The Xbox 360's chips were smaller and thus cheaper to make than that and it was still a loss leader.

In the end, you are only agreeing with my point anyway, that the days of consoles taking losses on console hardware is over.
Sony is to broke to do it, Microsoft's shareholders aren't happy with it.

AMD doesn't jump on a new node because a "bright and shiny" new console platform is about to be released. They do it when it makes sense and that is usually when it's financially feasible to do so.
If the hardware isn't available to kick start a new generation, then we will not get a new console generation, it really is that simple.

You forget that AMD's primary market is the PC and not the consoles.
Consoles are just leveraging the massive amounts of R&D and development that is done for the PC market to lower costs and development time. (Which is why you will never see fully custom processors in a console ever again.)
The downside to that is that consoles need to stick with the PC's hardware development cadence.

2021 at the earliest. 5 years after the Pro launch. Don't expect it to be a "next gen" console. those days are long gone. Will be more powerful than the Pro but but not buy a huge margin.

When I said cell was expensive I wasn't specifically talking about the actual cost to make each chip. I was looking at it from an overall point of view. The time and investment PS put in with IBM in the design and the manufacturing facility costs PS incurred to make it all happen. That is something PS really doesn't have to worry about with AMD because they take care of most of that and PS just pays for it. Having AMD and other companies taking care of the off the shelf, semi custom manufacturing and Foxconn assembling the console is a big reason why PS4 was able to come in at $399. PS has way less on their plate when it comes to PS4 hardware as a whole.

PS and Sony don't have the backing or the want to try and subsidize again just in case, and I don't blame them either. As long as constant upgrades with reasonable trade in's exist, there's no problem with selling at cost, or even a small profit. Why MS doesn't just subsidize PS into the ground I don't know. They have the means to do so and quite quickly. They would have the performance console market to themselves afterwards, unless Apple or Samsung decided to jump into the ring. I don't want MS to price/push PS out of console gaming, but everyone knows if they really wanted to, they could. Makes me wonder whether XB is mostly a warning to PS to stay away from their Windows/PC market. 

I wasn't saying AMD will bend over backwards for PS and MS just for their consoles, and no they wouldn't jump to unproven nodes for that reason either. That's not what I meant by finding a solution. I do think AMD would most certainly want to help PS and MS as much as possible because when AMD was hurting, PS and MS jumped on board and have been helping AMD financially to get going again, indirectly.

They aren't the only reason, as Polaris for PC has been a pretty big hit for AMD so far, but treating PS and MS like their just another random customer, who can just take a hike if they don't like it, I don't see happening. It's not like PS and MS have many options to choose from for an x86 CPU and performance GPU, but with Ryzen about to take market share from Intel, leading to falling prices of Intel chips, and whispers of Intel potentially using AMD tech for their SOC's instead of Nvidia, there's nothing saying PS and MS may not look elsewhere in a pinch. AMD is the go to right now of course, but PS and MS aren't completely locked in if they don't want to be.

I think Pachter is right. Unless Scorpio really starts kicking PS4 tail, I think 2020 would be realistic.

You do realise that the Cell was used for more than just the Playstation right? There is a reason why other companies threw their weight behind it, Sony didn't carry the entire burden of the Cell's development.
IBM invented allot of the I.P. (PowerPC) which companies like Apple (Mac) and Microsoft (Xbox) licensed in their own semi-custom designs.

Mercury Systems used it in it's Blade servers, which trickled into defense and military segments, IBM used it in Super Computers, pretty sure Toshiba threw it into Televisions...

Besides, you are just re-affirming my point. Sony and Microsoft are not going to take losses on console hardware. That includes everything, including R&D.

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft cannot just throw as much money as it see's fit to "fix" a problem.
It has to abide by various laws... And it needs to keep shareholders happy.

Competition is a good thing for the market, which is why I would prefer Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to be on equal footing... As that will benefit the consumer the most with lower prices and better products.

AMD isn't a person. It is a business. - It doesn't care if other business's are "hurting" as it doesn't have feelings.
AMD is comprised of thousands of different people who all have different ideas and perspectives.

If nVidia or Intel gives Microsoft or Sony a better deal, you can bet your ass that they will choose them over AMD.

Ryzen isn't on the market, thus we have zero idea if it will take any relevent marketshare.
Even when AMD was beating Intel, Intel still controlled the majority of the market.

Plus AMD isn't releasing any high-end chipsets to go with Ryzen, Ryzen itself is also not going to be as fast or as efficient as Intel.
Ryzen has taken multiple cost-efficient design choices though to keep costs low.

And there is also some rumours (To be taken with pinches of salt) that Ryzen has a few bugs that may hinder performance in some cases, bugs in CPU's aren't uncommon, but ones that impact reliability and performance aren't a good sign. (Case in point: TLB in Phenom.)

As for x86. There is no requirement that forces Microsoft and Sony to use x86. ARM can already soundly beat Jaguar.

16TF Navi GPU and 8-core Ryzen and 1TB SSD in a $399-449 2020 console? Some of you are saying this isn't good enough? Not sure if serious or....

For starters, Vega 10 is rumored to clock in at ~ 1525 MHz, delivering 12.5Tflops in a 225-250W TDP power envelope. Vega 10 will be flagship AMD card in 2017, which implies $549-649 MSRP. The GPU inside OG PS4 was a cut-down HD7850/7870, which by November 2013 cost less than $179 USD:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7503/the-amd-radeon-r9-270x-270-review-feat-asus-his

Vega 20 is supposed to be a 7nm die shrink of Vega 10, inside 150W TDP. Navi might hit 18 Tflops by 2019, but it will cost $550-650 and have 225-250W TDP on 7nm. Based on power usage alone, the idea that PS5 will have a 16Tflops Navi on 7nm is a nice day dream.

Then we get to the cost. Even if everything goes smoothly, a $650 2019 Navi would still cost $350 in retail by 2020. The GPU inside PS4 Pro is barely at a level of a 170 RX470 8GB and is slower than a $200 RX 480 8GB. Similar to OG PS4 or PS4 Pro, Sony used a GPU that cost roughly $169-179 in retail. So how in the world would a 16-18Tflops Navi with 16GB of HBM2 cost just $170-180 by 2020?

We didn't even get to the price of 8-core Ryzen CPU or M.2 SSD.

Fact is, even an 8-10Tflops PS5 would be a gigantic leap at the $399 price level in 2020. Until MS and Sony drop PS4/XB1 as the base consoles, the 4.2-6Tflops specs of the Pro and Scorpio are nice marketing gimmicks. To truly see how much potential an 8-10Tflops PS5 has, games would need to be made from the ground-up for PS5 or more powerful PC hardware of 2019-2020.

Not to mention how misleading the Tflop metric itself is. 6.5Tflops GTX1070 is faster than the 8.6Tflops Fury X [Tflops is just a measure of arithmetic logic unit of a GPU, but GPUs are often bottlenecked by other specs), while games like Uncharted 4: Lost Legacy, The Last of Us 2 look better than 90% of PC games. What difference does it make if Titan XP has almost 12Tflops of compute power in 2016 when Uncharted 4 Lost Legacy and BF:1 look excellent on a 1.84Tflop PS4? The extra power of modern hardware is used for higher resolutions and FPS, but not so much for next generation graphical fidelity. Then how are some of you judging that 8-10Tflops isn't a big enough leap when there is NOT 1 game in the world that was made from the ground-up to fully take advantage of an 8-10Tflops GPU?

Let's look at the facts again. GTX580 had about 1.58Tflops of compute power in late 2010. There were 0 games that looked anywhere as good as Uncharted 4, Horizon Zero Dawn, Rise of the Tomb Raider, BF1, SW:BF, Dying Light, Resident Evil 7, Forza Horizon 3, Doom, etc. (maybe Crysis 1 or Skyrim/Oblivion modded) back then. Even if GTX580 could hypothetically run these games, they didn't exist. Point is, 2020-2022 next gen games would look a lot better on a 8-10Tflops PS5 than they do now on an 11.6Tflops TXP/Vega. Could Vega run some of those 2020 games? Of course, but that's not the point. The games launching in 2017 will not be targeting 1080/1080Ti/TXP/Vega, but much, much weaker GPUs. That's why claiming that 8-10Tflops PS5 isn't a big enough leap is an absurd claim. As I said earlier, NCU or Vega/Navi may have superior IPC/efficiency per Tflop than Pitcairn/Polaris 10.

Polaris 10 already has 18-40% greater IPC than GCN1.0/1.1, depending on the modern AAA game, level of tessellation used, etc. Therefore, even as a starting point it will be 100% wrong to simply divide a 10Tflops 2019-2020 AMD NCU-GCN GPU / 1.84TFlops Pitcairn GCN1.0/1.1 to derive a performance relationship. With only 32 ROPs, 144TMUs and 256-bit memory bus, RX480 is often trading performance with 64 ROP, 160-176TMUs, 64 ROP R9 390/390X. If those metric system mean nothing to you, why are you guys insist on using ALU/shader bound performance to judge GPUs? Even the memory bandwidth cannot be compared since OG PS4 lacks delta color compression. Therefore, it will also be 100% inaccurate to take 512GB/Sec memory bandwidth and simply divide it by 176GB/sec of the PS4. 

Scott Wasson of AMD already discussed how certain features of Vega could provide a significant performance boost over Fury X but only if programmers specifically took advantage of those new capabilities. How are some you extrapolating any hidden/incremental performance benefits of Vega/Navi/Navi+ GPU architectures when we haven't seen them in action? These additional benefits aren't explicitly baked in the Tflop measurements. 

Why don't we let PS5's games do the talking on whether 8-12Tflops GCN 5.0-6.0 is good enough of a leap or not?

Some astute PC gamers on this forum would tell you that TFlops performance cannot be directly compared. 1080 is roughly 21-23% faster in games over the 1070, but the former has approximately 37% higher Tflops rating. Tflops is an easy number to calculate but on its own in a vacuum, it's not necessarily sufficient to tell us how much better 2020-2022 PS5 games would look on a 8-10Tflop GPU. 

I'd guessed 2020 myself. But, will I upgrade in 2020? Probably not. I have a PS4 and a PS4 Pro, yet I still game mostly on PS3. Playing the last of us again on PS4 really wasn't all that appealing, as I'd beaten it on PS3 already. At least 4 times.

Tekken wont be on the console at launch, and probably not much anything else I'd be interested in. PS4 didn't really blow me away until last E3. Games we're still waiting for. But, who knows, if it's backwards compatible, and it should be, I may get it sooner.

I wonder if the PS5 Pro, and standard editions will be developed together... Or... it'll probably just have parts you can easily snap in or out of the console after removing a couple screws. Full PS compatibility better be one of the add-ons.

Lol...... ok lets see. Sony and MS sell a $400 console. That in truth costs them $420 to build. Sony sells theirs for $400. MS sells theirs for $100 and takes a hit of $320 on each unit sold because they have money.

If MS sold 20M of those consoles, they would have lost $6.4B. thats billion. And we are just talking about what they lost on the console sale. Not even what they have lost on R&D, marketing...etc cause at that point everything xbox related will just be a loss.

And no company gets into anything just to lose money.

Put my money on November 2019.

I actually agree with this.

By 2020, people will get 4k TVs for broadcasts in 4k, and by then, a new console will be needed to showcase that.

That seems like a really good time to launch a new console.