| Nate4Drake said: COULD A PS4 SLIM BE ON THE WAY? Samsung EVP says memory chips are 'best solution available for games consoles'; hints at a possible new slimline PlayStation system. The PS4 Slim may soon be a reality, as Samsung today announced that it has begun mass-producing the industry’s first 8 gigabit (1GB) GDDR5 DRAM memory chips. Rumours that the memory may be included in an upcoming gaming system were fuelled by Joo Sun Choi, executive vice president of memory sales and marketing, stating that: "We expect that our 8Gb GDDR5 will provide original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with the best graphics memory solution available for game consoles as well as general use notebook PCs." Furthermore, Samsung's press release stated that the chips are designed for use in "on-board graphics memory for game consoles". Although these comments could have related to any number of systems, a new PS4 model seems to stack up due to the fact that Sony's console already uses 16 512MB GDDR5 chips from Samsung. Switching to eight 1GB chips would lead to obvious space and cost savings, which Samsung itself confirmed: "Combining only eight of the new 8Gb chips will achieve the same density as the 8 gigabytes (GB) needed in the latest game consoles." With the PS4 being the only console to make use of GDDR5, Samsung's hint was received loud and clear, with forums and social media already buzzing with speculation. What do you think of this news? Would you look forward to seeing the release of a PS4 Slim? http://powerupgaming.co.uk/articles/539-could-a-ps4-slim-model-be
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Samsung only lists one kind of product for the 4Gb chips, which is a console, so it's pretty sound logic to think that these 8Gb chips will make it into PS4 at some point, I would think as soon as quantities are sufficient Sony would just make the switch to those chips and half the time it takes for that stage of production.
Initial teardowns and costings of GDDR5 at launch put 16X4Gb GDDR5 chips at $88, even if the cost per chip was 50% more than the 4Gb chips Sony would still make a saving of $22 on the chips alone, but that costing was done a little over a year ago, Sony may only be able to reduce costs by a fraction of that amount if the price of RAM had already been reduced, still any saving is better than nothing.
As for making a smaller box, it depends on whether other parts can be made more efficient as far as power consumption goes, because that would mean less power is needed to drive the console, say if the APU goes from the 28nm model Sony are using now, down to 20nm, at 120Watts (rough guess on what the APU may be consuming) in the 28nm power bracket it gets reduced to 85watts, RAM modules going from the potential 28nm chips being used right now for the 4Gb chips, down to these new 20nm 8Gb chips would also shave a few watts, so the PSU in the box can be reduced.
Sony may want to wait until they can go down to a 14nm fabrication scale before they make a slim model, because they'd end up making more money sticking with the same case and getting costs down for the current model.
I suspect we'll see a price drop by E3 this year, with Sony saving on RAM costs and manufacturing, also with all of the games coming out this year they'll be able to better subsidize the console from the huge software sales they'll be making and not forgetting extra PS+ subs and Periphals sold as a revenue stream.
The earliest I would expect a Slimmer PS4 is late 2016, possibly October, with an announcement for that coming a little before that.
