An estimate made within a forum thread isn't really sufficient evidence in my book...

Indeed. The Geometry Engines have been a bit of sticking point for AMD... The irony is, they beat nVidia to the Tessellation game by 9-10 years and yet nVidia's Polymorph engines have consistently beaten AMD to the punch.

In saying that, Graphics Core Next has some serious limitations, so I doubt AMD will go past 4 Geometry Engines, but will likely increase each individual Geometry Engines capabilities, which AMD has been doing consistently with almost every Graphics Core Next update.

I think people are looking into it to much.
Yes, Sony likely made some architectural suggestions, but AMD still needs to work within the confines of Graphics Core Next.

The reason for the amount of staff that is dumped on Navi is simple though, Semi-Custom chip designs, aka. Multiple chips for Microsoft, Sony, PC APU's (Desktop and Notebook!), PC GPU's. - There is hundreds of millions of dollars up for grabs.
It's not a small job to pull off all at once... But the financial gains for AMD is absolutely massive, hence the urgency in dumping as much staff onto the project.

I agree. Also can't wait!

Also happy to be proven wrong. At the end of the day, I am a tech enthusiast, so it's still a win.

The main impact will be on the development side of the equation, developers will need to allocate workloads to get the most out of the differing bandwidths and capacities.
They will also need to spend more transistors on additional memory controllers to drive it all, which will also cost power.

In short, it's not impossible, but I don't see it being likely... They would probably be best served going with a single large pool of GDDR6.
Remember... It will also be Ryzen powered... And we all know how much Ryzen loves it's bandwidth!

The Xbox 360 managed to get away with 32Mb of Ram for it's OS... The Xbox One wanted 3072MB... And each time the consoles were simply doing more.
More data is being cached to speed up various operations, things like higher quality voice chat, video streaming, multi-tasking were all implemented.

In short, the consoles are becoming more PC-like, which means they need more memory.

I don't think there is an immediate need for more than 4GB for an OS yet though, you can do a surprising amount with that... But let's just wait and see how the cards fall.

But if there is going to be targeted 8k User-Interfaces, then I don't expect the memory usage to be small. - Microsoft will likely use a UI that scales up well, but uses minimal memory, but they are a software/OS engineering giant...

There are ways to reduce load times rather than resorting to faster storage subsystems.

Either way, load times haven't really been a contentious issue between consoles anyway.

When they confirmed Backwards Compatibility, I'm 100% sure it was in reference to PS4 games. Not PS3, PS2, or PS1 games. Expecting them to do that is just dumb, and completely irresponsible thinking.

Just because all of PlayStation's flagship consoles were disc based, doesn't mean they'll work just fine regardless of hardware and architecture disparity/differences.

It's not like Sony has it's finger on an On/Off switch and just refuse to flip it on in the name of pure greed. 

The funny thing is games seem to often load more in the 8th gen than last gen. Even with vastly faster and more RAM, better CPUs, better GPUs and being optimized for HDDs. The load times in fighting games have suddenly become the worst they've ever been.

I don't feel running games off a HDD was done out of necessity. The PS3 was able to run games directly from a BD disc, so did the Wii U (likely BD tech). Therefore its not crazy to assume PS4 and X1 could have as well especially with their faster drives. I believe they opted for HDD primarily because that made optimization easier, faster transfer speeds and storage dropped in price significantly.

I'm not sure what they did to make Spiderman load so fast on the PS5 devkit, but I think they're misleading us on how it was done. He's giving the impression its because of the SSD on its own, but that just doesn't make sense. I believe it has more to do with the other specs of the hardware, especially RAM. I mean if basically all the textures and other assets can be stored in RAM, that's gonna eliminate much of the streaming needed from the storage. Maybe consoles using unified RAM helps simplify this process.

There won't be any official numbers to give you. The profits estimative comes more from similar earnings, but PSN alone costing less than whole of Nintendo. So if earning are close but costs are lower then profits are higher.

You may dispute if they are really higher, equal or lower. But the main factor remains that it is still very close.

My point from the beginning is that stating that PSN makes as much money (which I've defined as profit) is a statement that cannot be made as we have zero evidence - and no, an estimate made on a forum has never, nor ever will be, counted as evidence. Maybe it makes more, maybe it makes less, maybe it makes the same - the bottom line is that we don't know, so stating a possibility as fact is wrong!

PSN costs will be massive as the majority of games sales will be paid out to devs. I'd even imagine that only a slice of 1st party games will be attributed PSN with the majority of the sale being attributed to the the development division (after all, they done most of the work). It's essentially a store - and like any store, costs are going to be high relative to revenue as they have to pay the suppliers (or in this case the devs). So I'm really not sure where you're getting this notion that costs will be low... By the way, I've made this point about PSN costs multiple times now, which you seem to completely ignore and instead repeat your knuckle-headed position of 'PSN costs are low'.

If you could pay attention to what I'm writing rather than just trying to win the argument at all costs in the most smug way possible then we might actually get somewhere.

I'm not disputing anything - you are the one disputing my position of 'we don't have the evidence to arrive at a conclusion'.

So unless you can provide this evidence I'm not really sure what you want from me??

Earnings are declared where it happens. So a 1st party game sold on PSN have the revenue declared as PSN revenue, if it were otherwise then 3rd party games sold on PSN would have only Sony portion declared.

Nintendo have the cost of Switch (which let's say sell at break even) that takes much more from the profit than Sony paying the dev cut... game sold at Walmart and PSN the dev/pub get about the same, on Walmart let's say Walmart get 10 and Sony 15, on PSN Sony get 25 (so from 60 sale, 25 profit - 40% margin).

And sorry, but your posture were more on it being impossible that PSN profit more than all of Nintendo instead of it not being possible to prove it right or wrong.

First paragraph is true, but because everything increased in size, so loading and processing is much higher and that increases loading time (although my experience on PS4 is that games install faster and load faster than on PS3). GTS is much much much faster to enter a race or retry than GT5.

PS3 had mandatory install for most games and some were almost the size of the game. I guess the price for a faster BD drive were higher than a bigger HDD to mandate install, and with digital games being much more relevant and needing HDD anyway there weren't much benefit for they to put better BDs (even more because then the HDD would be the issue, and games need to run equally well from physical or digital purchase).

PS4 have unified RAM, rumor is that PS5 won't be unified (but sure a lot faster) and isn't that much bigger to the point the whole SM would fit on the RAM. They can be misleading, but doesn't seem the case. Why would they put so much money on the storage solution if the gain would be minimal? Because we can be sure that the price difference from a regular 2TB HDD is much lower than 2TB SDD on the type of speed he is talking about (higher than any available to PC, here he can't lie because that is spec).

https://www.ps4storage.com/ps4-ssd-vs-hdd/

Most games loaded twice as fast on the SSD compared to HDD, and that is on a system that wasn't designed to take the benefits of SSD. So a native solution, on a high bandwidth, SSD could be a very good thing on PS5.

Can't find exact speeds but it does seem PS4 has a faster drive, so that would explain the faster install. Also, PS3 was slow as fuck for updates.

PS3 had a slow drive so some developers compensated with partial installs. But over time I do recall games being better optimized to run directly off the disc. Anyhoo, I'm arguing it was possible to run 8th gen games off a BD disc, I'm not arguing they should have.

Having seen SSD vs HDD loading videos, it seems to me open world games have a huge loading disparity. Most games may not be impacted as much. I certainly hope the move to SSD great reduces load times next gen. However, I wouldn't be surprised if developers use this as opportunity to spend less time optimizing.

While this discussion really does need to get back on track, regarding the financial talk, Don is likely referring to this: https://www.dualshockers.com/psn-made-more-money-in-2018-than-nintendo-xbox/

Don: This means that PSN generated more revenue than all of Nintendo in 2018 (not overall). Just to clear up the confusion.

Can't find exact speeds but it does seem PS4 has a faster drive, so that would explain the faster install. Also, PS3 was slow as fuck for updates.

PS3 had a slow drive so some developers compensated with partial installs. But over time I do recall games being better optimized to run directly off the disc. Anyhoo, I'm arguing it was possible to run 8th gen games off a BD disc, I'm not arguing they should have.

Having seen SSD vs HDD loading videos, it seems to me open world games have a huge loading disparity. Most games may not be impacted as much. I certainly hope the move to SSD great reduces load times next gen. However, I wouldn't be surprised if developers use this as opportunity to spend less time optimizing.