| curl-6 said: It's not just a case of money though. Neo's chip not only has to be affordable, but also be able to fit into a console chassis and not melt the damn thing. Powerful chips run hot; they need fans, heat sinks, room for air to circulate, all of which take up space. I wouldn't be surprised to see a pattern emerge with future releases where Xbox One runs at 720p, Vanilla PS4 at 900p, and Neo/Scorpio at 1080p. Battlefield 1 might be the first such release if Neo does arrive this year. |
This is where die size, power consumption, thermals and end cost are all complementary.
Assuming the transistor count isn't increased to the degree where a same size piece of etched silicon requires more power to operate, generating more waste heat in the process, hardware designers typically utilize a lower die size process, allowing the same number of transistors to be etched on a smaller piece of silicon, or more transistors on the same size of silicon, but in practice, find a balance anywhere in between that still results in lower power consumption, lower thermals yet with better performance.
Per unit production cost goes down as well when the reduced size of a silicon chip means more chips can be cut from the same size silicon wafer.
I can't think of any examples where a manufacturer used a larger piece of silicon per chip in later iterations of their previous hardware, so the thermals are generally pre-set when the console is initially being designed. And sometimes the cooling solutions have to be re-engineered when the designers didn't do their job well. Granted, MS flubbed badly with the XB360, as did SCE with the original A01 model PS3s, later iteration power consumption and thermals are the perfect illustration of what will happen with the XBO and PS4.
They're just going to add more transistors to the chip designs that are replacing the original ones within the expected power consumption and cost restrictions using the new smaller die process.
