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SonytendoAmiibo said:
 

It's a proven fact that companies keep there customers miserable. RETAIL THERAPY (shopping in order to make oneself feel happier) is the way the companies will give you happiness for a price.

Look at how Nintendo trolled new amiibo launches knowing most people would never get to even see one, let alone buy it. Then later on more stock arrives and quickly sells out. (amiibo are happiness).

Marketing wise, this is why SONY is releasing a more powerful PS4. Make your customers miserable with the one they have now and make them happy when they buy the new one.

Haha nice conspiracy theory, plays right into this
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-lichdom-battlemage-is-the-worst-performing-game-weve-tested
I guess that's why Sony let that game through.

I'm more inclined to believe Lafiel's theory

Lafiel said:

As I said, my theory is that it's simply not viable to shrink the current architecture, so they have to use one made for 14/16nm finfet to use this process.

But using a same-spec (18CU etc) chip as the old one opens a whole new can of worms, because code written "to the metal" for the old chip won't run as efficiently out of the box (and they certainly don't want every game to need a patch) on the new architecture, so to circumvent this problem they imo always had to throw in additional CUs to make sure the finfet chip can brute force PS4 parity in unpatched games. Doubling the CU count even makes it possible to sell the PS4 Neo at a higher price as long as both version coexist > higher margins.

Due to the enormous differences in structure size between chips made in 28nm and 14/16nm the PS4 Neo APU will certainly have a smaller die size than the current PS4 APU and in the end (when yields have caught up and process costs have sunken due to enough production capacities being available) that's the most important factor for chip price per unit (the more working chips you get from a silicon wafer, the cheaper they are per unit).


SvennoJ said:

Ahh that makes sense, so the new GPU would be a different architecture. Sounds like a massive oversight at the time the ps4 was designed, causing quite a pita for developers going forward. So brute force emulation of the base model with the option to write more efficient NEO specific code. (those separate NEO GPU binaries make sense now) Clusterfuck with a silver lining...

at the time they finalised the PS4 they might still have been hopeful to be able to use the 20nm process in the future and there were reports of AMD attempting to make use of that one up until dec 2014, yet it seems that never came to fruition and with that died that option for X1/PS4 APUs aswell

the newest processes even have a changed transistor layout (finfet) afaik effectively making "shrinks" complete redesigns, so that might have been out of the question from the get go

Bite the bullet now so a cheaper slim can eventually still happen. Unlike the original XBox which had to be dropped as costs could not be saved.

It still sucks.