globalisateur said:
Arkaign said:
^^ Yeah. The sort of crappy thing about the new console gen is that die shrinks are now REALLY slow to come about, and are now so expensive that it takes a long time for midrange and lower parts to be shrunk. Making it worse is that Intel has the best process tech (by about a gen and a half), and TSMC, Samsung, GF are all behind the curve.
Whereas in previous gens we saw rapid (and widespread) reduction from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm to 45nm, this gen is really stuck in the mud.
28nm is what the Jaguar APUs started out as this time around, with 20nm planned. But 20nm has run into problems and delays, combined with very high costs.
GF even canceled 20nm bulk : http://wccftech.com/amd-cancelled-skybridge-glofo-terminated-20nm/
So, this hurts both MS and Sony in terms of getting better/slimmer consoles released. Improvements happen over time even with the same die lithography, but not nearly to the same degree as when you're able to cut a ton of heat/power with a solid die shrink.
Best guess : we see die-shrunk Jaguar APUs for the X1/PS4 arrive no sooner than Xmas 2016, and more likely sometime in 2017. And that will be the only revised APU during the entirety of the 8th gen. ~10nm will appear before 2020, but the economics won't support getting Jaguar on it. |
The new GDDR5 1GB rams included in the 1200 models have being shrinked down to 20nm.
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So what we'll see in a future redesign is a logic board with 8x1GB DDR5 modules instead of the original 16x512MB DDR5 modules as cutting the physical number of chips reduces cost and power requirements, but SCE will still need to incorporate a smaller die SoC to further cut down on the amount of silicon required, PSU required to power it, cooling required to manage it and size of case required to house it before we see a major redesign with that further lowered MSRP.
It's a taller order to reduce the die size for the Jaguar APU as an SoC requires much more power and subsequently generates much more heat than the passively cooled DDR5 RAM modules. But it's just a matter of time.
