ethomaz said:
Do you think there are chance to some massive production discount or some component to have lower price until the launch? |
No, out of question for both MS and Sony. At this time, there aren't enough 28nm lines available, and none of the lines are available for optimization*. We will see low APU yields for both companies well into 2014. AMD does not have lines, they are subcontracting to TSMC (which has working 28nm lines) or GF (which has 28nm lines, but until a few months ago, they were still reported to struggle getting good yields from their 32nm lines. AMD paid a huge penalty to get out of its GF contracts last year, so I assume AMD doesn't really believe in GF anymore at this time).
*yields can improve drastically by optimizing the work flow and by machine parameter wiggling. Intel has high yields in its processor lines because they only make Intel processors 24/7 on dedicated lines. TSMC is a pure contractor, they don't make their own stuff, their lines make stuff for AMD/NVidia/Apple/whoever wants something done. So TSMC has to switch its lines from making chip a to chip b to chip c to ..... from time to time, and likely all these chips a,b,c,d,.. have different design philosophies. This switching around chips obviously hinders optimization, which usually takes 1-2 years until perfection. You simply can't perfect lines if you have to switch every 1-3(?) months to another chip.
One of the main components that will see drastic price declines within 2 years is the gddr5 chips. If Sony sells 10mio PS4 per year, this means 160 million gddr5 chips alone for Sony, basically an entire line is busy throughout the year. There is very little room for improvement in the PS4 design, it is already smaller than a PS3 slim. The next step to 20nm will decrease the APU sizes, but this is probably not going to happen in the next three years, not unitl the 20nm lines are fully "understood". I'm still puzzled by the Kinect2 hardware, though. In my books, that stuff still runs $300-$400 if contractors made it. Probably MS was able to buy (rent?) an old, complete sub-100nm line for the 500*400 tof chip (these tof chips were done until recently in x00nm technology which maxed out the resolution to 320*160, otherwise the chips would have ended up >1000mm^2).
