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Squilliam on 16 December 2008
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NJ5 said:
Squilliam said:
NJ5 said:
heruamon said:
I just love it when people throw out numbers...kinda like...You'll never need mor ethan 640 kb...or maybe many of you are simply too young to remember that...or that the PC was never going to appeal to the masses. Flash memory is the future, and looking at how the cost has shrunk in the last 3 years, WITHOUT a major catalyst, I can see it being a viable median for the future. It's small and compact, and uses less power, generates less heat, and is cooler to tote around (okay...no scientific data for this one).

It's just not very clear to me that the costs will be low enough for the next generation.

 

You've been saying how the hardware costs on the PS3 won't scale well with time due to proprietary technology. The costs are high enough this generation really.

You have:

  • Optical Drive $20-40 at launch.
  • HDD $30-40 at launch.
  • Extra memory, motherboard complexity $10
  • Packaging also cannot scale as well, as an optical drive must always be fitted
  • Total: $60-90 in fixed costs which will hardly drop for the lifetime of the console.

 

 

 

 

You're talking about fixed costs. What I 'm suspicious of are the costs of putting each copy of a game in flash. I haven't yet seen an argument for why these costs will be negligible even in 2011 for a big game (as they are with optical media especially DVD right now). $5 for 16 GB of storage media alone isn't acceptable I suspect (and that's not the current price).

BTW, why did you mention HDD? That wouldn't be removed, at most it could be turned into Solid State Drive which is not free. Also it has nothing to do with game media, it's required either way for downloads etc.

 

Flash is currently produced on the 50nm process node. At 30nm a 10mm by 10mm area of flash will likely be up 2.5* as dense. So if you had 1gb on that flash, you would now have 2.5gb. Intels 32nm process looks to be coming on stream by the end of 2009, so it does follow that they could easily start producing flash at the 22nm and fit over 4* as many transistors in the same area of silicon. So that flash you can buy on Newegg for $5 which contains 4gb of storage, will easily hold 4x that quantity by the time the next generation consoles are being produced.

I mentioned HDDs as they will become a required part of the console kit as optical drives simply are not fast enough to deliver the content a more modern console will require in a timely manner.

 



Tease.