Third parties will kill the PS4/720

[Soleron]

Adinnieken said:

Soleron said:....

Actually AMD sold off it's fab in March of last year, 2012.  Prior to that, in 2008 it contributed it's fabrication business to jointly build another company that eventually became GlobalFoundries.  AMD likely still owned it's portion of the fab business when it entered into contracts with any company.  So any contracts that they held would have been included in the sale if not conditions would have been set in the contract on the basis of a sale.

GF was a seperate company in 2008 with its own financial reporting. AMD had a small stake in the result until 2012 but contracts with GF (like the STMicro one) were definitely attributable to GF. The words semi-custom imply taking an existing AMD core and modifying; AMD do not have the resources to work with someone else's core.

That out of the way, GlobalFoundries not only does the fab work for AMD, but they also work with IBM.  In fact, on an early rumor regarding the next Xbox IBM and GlobalFoundries were listed as working on the CPU. 

An early, incorrect rumour.

So it is possible that AMD is doing the engineering, while the CPU includes ARM cores and Power cores, and GlobalFoundries is doing the fab work.

No.

That being said, the original Xbox 360 with a Power 5+ core consumed 203W, with the latest version it's down to 115W. 

No, the console power brick was 203W. Cut 10% for internal losses, another 10% for the other components, and then split that 50-50 between CPU and GPU. It launched at more like 80W then. Even that is high given the 360's cooling.

I have to imagine with an even smaller die (28nm vs. 45nm) IBM would have been able to develop an even more efficient processor from the Power7 family.  

No, because IBM has no incentive to do so. They make the vast majority of their money from server boards where it doesn't really matter about low power per socket. You're right, they could do the 360's CPU better on 32nm, but then it would be no faster than a 360. It's impossible they will have something better than what Intel has on the desktop due to the R&D disparity.

 I mean in a 50% size reduction (90nm to 45nm) they cut power a little less than 50%.  Why would they not be able to do that again? 

Because they only have 32nm now.

 Not to mention, ARM-based processors are typically extremely efficient since they're used in mobile devices.  So could it be possible, even remotely, that Microsoft, IBM, and AMD could have designed a SOC with lower power consumption than the current specs would suggest,

No. It's economically impossible.

and couldn't GlobalFoundries, being both a partner with IBM and AMD, and likely receiving the benefit of any manufacturing deal with Sony or Microsoft, would have sold those contracts with the sale of their shares? 

Pretty elaborate theory to avoid what I said.

That's the problem of basing a discussion on rumor is the fact that there are reasonable assumptions we can make based on the facts that don't necessarily mesh with other rumors.  Eventually this discussion will come down to beating a dead horse or being inconclusive as they all do. 

I see what's going on here. I killed your argument already, now you have to say 'Well we don't know what happens'. Well I DO know what happens, and it's this, so basically let's reconvene in a year when I'm right.

And yes, I know the PS3's GPU was outdated.  But the Cell processor in the GPU helped to keep the PS3 from being obsolete immediately on day one.

The Cell was again much weaker than a Core 2 dual-core launched the previous year.