Why Sony went the Neo route

[Lafiel]

Teeqoz said:

Lafiel said:

uhm .. AMD certainly doesn't have that money to "waste"

if Sony insisted on AMD doing a 28nm -> 14/16nm die shrink "for free" after the probably planed 28nm -> 20nm one seemingly failed imo they would run a very high risk of bankrupting their APU supplier and in the aftermath of that losing out on hundreds of millions to billions of PS4 related profits

So you are telling me AMD aren't working towards a die shrink either way? I'm not saying AMD would do it "for free" but the op makes it sound like Sony would have to bank roll the entire thing.

I'm certain when AMD and Sony made the contracts for the PS4 APU, they had plans for atleast one future die shrink, but after years of research all parties realized the 20nm process is bad for bigger chips like that - there is no cost reduction to be had.

The new 14/16nm process uses a different transistor design, so the whole chip has to be redesigned to be manufactured in that process and AMD didn't "port over" the architecture they used in the PS4 chip to this new node, they designed a new architecture from the ground up for it. But a same-speced 14nm chip with that new architecture won't run the games "coded to the metal" of the old PS4 as efficiently as the old architecture and shrinking the old architecture costs hundreds of millions of dollars.