| NJ5 said: 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. $5 for 16 GB is your estimate, I think that's still too much. Probably 5-10 times more expensive than optical media. You don't need to buy many games to cancel out the savings on the optical drive. 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. Why? By the time the next generation comes, 4x or 8x Blu-Ray drives will be affordable, delivering much higher transfer speeds than PS3/360 optical drives. The only reason why a HDD may be needed is for downloadable content.
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$5 is my estimate for retail flash like SD cards. You wouldn't base your estimates on the viability of Blu Ray based on writeable media you can buy online would you? But in reality Blu Ray or DVD costs a publisher about $7 per disk if you include royalties.
Essentially I believe that consoles need to use a more "console-like" architecture in the future to be competitive and deliver the performance people need. By using slower media like Blu Ray it requires a console to essentially have a similar architecture as a standard personal computer because the challenges are the same. You have a slow data delivery so the information must be cached on much larger stores of ram.
This article explains it better if you haven't seen it: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ps2vspc.ars
Tease.
