| Stinky said: There is also the reason high-end GPU cards cost up to double what a whole console does. |
I think you confuse cost to MS/Sony and retail price to avg. consumers like us. AMD and NV sell the GPU, thermal components, power delivery components, PCB, and then AIBs add on additional costs such as warranty support, marketing, packaging costs, transportation costs, technical support, sales costs, etc. Then AIBs and retailers tack on additional profit margins for themselves. The end result is we have a graphics card that sells for $450-500 in retail channels that actually can be purchased / licensed by MS and Sony directly from AMD for ~$200. Since MS/Sony don't even need the PCB as the chips and memory/power delivery will be soldered to the console's motherboard, the costs are actually slightly less.
For example, when the median price for a GTX580 was $482 in stores, NV sold all of the components for $210 to its board partners:
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/1461/q2msa.gif
Therefore you can estimate that a GTX680/HD7970GE roughly costs $200-220 at most to purchase directly by MS/Sony as these GPUs sell for $400-450 in retail. Therefore, including a GPU like an HD7850 with 2GB of DDR5 is not unreasonable for a console that costs $399. After all, MS paid $141 directly for Xbox 360's GPU in 2005 to AMD/ATI when the total BOM for Xbox 360 was $525:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20051123214405.html
I am not buying the excuse that MS cannot afford to include an HD7770-7850 with GDDR5. Sounds like they are going the Nintendo route and trying to either minimize losses on their console, sell us gimmicks instead of high-end hardware or are simply being cheap.
Also, by the time PS4/Xbox 720 launch, a chip like HD7970 will be 'outdated' and last generation, which means the cost to manufacture it will be even lower by Q4 2013 than today's manufacturing market prices.
Again, MS supposedly paid $141 to purchase the entire Xbox 360 GPU sub-system but the current rumored HD7770Ghz level of GPU performance can be purchased in retail for just $100-110, which suggests that MS could purchase this GPU subsystem for $50-60. Sounds like we are getting the short end of the stick with the 720.
In practice, Xbox 720's DDR3 memory bandwidth seems to be estimated at just 68GB/sec. 1.76Tflops HD7850 has 154GB/sec:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=678&card2=677
If Sony retains GDDR5 for its GPU, Xbox 720's GPU is going to be significantly slower.
