| phaedruss said:
Multiple reasons. Cheap laptop APUs+console bulk quantities+time. It's really as simple as that. These don't change and they'll keep manufacturing more and more of them. More powerful APUs will be more expensive obviously, but the ones in the xbox one and ps4, especially the PS4 since it doesn't have the esRAM, will drop in price pretty quickly. Not to mention the cost of GDDR5 will go down in regards to the PS4 at least. Whether or not DDR3 will continue to go down is another story as I've seen a convincing argument that as DDR4 is adopted DDR3 will get more expensive.
EDIT: Also, your entire premise is based on a smaller node process, right? Well you don't need a smaller node process for the current one to get cheaper, in fact it'll probably continue to get cheaper and cheaper. |
These APU's are far from cheap ... In fact they are porbably more expensive to manufacture than the AMD kaveri APUs. A 350mm^2 die sure may not be top of the end but it does have a sizeable manufacturing cost. I don't expect the cost of GDDR5 going down significantly and the same goes for DDR3 because they both depended on the free lunch that moore's law provided to get a cost reduction.
Current node is the cheapest and it is already in an asymptote so don't expect any sort of marignal improvements in cost reduction. I'm giving it 5% improvement at BEST years later down the road.
