| Intrinsic said: You can call my idea nonsensical. Technically it's not even my idea. But the fact is this, it's already happenning. So we'll see. I'll say again. developers aren't supporting different skus. they are supporting One SKU that just happens to have settings for low, medium, high and ultra settings. Like you know, what's been done in the PC space for like.... forever. |
Ever consider this might be a one time thing instead of jumping to conclusions of an incremental console model?
To quote Lafiel again, his theory on why this is happening is much more plausible, actually a change in architecture making a traditional slim not profitable.
| 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). |
Lafiel said:
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 |
Which means we'll have a traditional NEO slim next and than a ps5. Seems far more logical.
