drkohler said:
You are again one of the people who doesn't quite understand the difference between manufacturing costs and production costs. What you add are not manufacturing costs, they are adding to the product cost. The cost of the PS4 is made up of manufacturing costs (where Sony cannot tweak the costs) and the stuff you mention (where every manufacturer has its own rules/timeline of recouping those costs). I wouldn't bet on Sony/MS going AMD/GF though for chip manufacturing. They are way,way,way,way,way behind Intel amd way,way behing Samsung and way behind TSMC (with an unknown factor soon playing a role, the new chinese plants). We've gone through those numbers umpteen times in various threads (basically in cell -cost-threads). However, the approximate price list given here should give you an idea why there is no die-shrink cell for the PS3 around.. |
I totally get the difference between manufacturing and production costs. Why would we only look at manufacturing costs? That is only a small part of the picture... Sony's own R&D that goes in to PS4, AMD's R&D in to processor and GPU (if we believe they will go with AMD) all need to be considered.
I find that retail value of products is best benchamrk we can look at when measuring cost of that product.
For example, lets take a 400 dollar GPU like an MSI Radeon 7970. It retails now for ~400 dollars. This means that in order for this product to make money for AMD that made the GPU, MSI that is the OEM of the video card, for it and retailer like Best Buy that sells it... the consumer needs to pay 400 dollars for it.
I know that's not what the card costs to AMD, MSI or Best buy...but that is how much money needs to be paid for the product for everyone to make an acceptable profit. This price accounts for everything, manufacturing, R&D, packiging, transportation, storage... Same goes for a console like PS4.
Why would we only look at manufacturing costs when trying to figure out how much a PS4 will cost?
