PS5 release date predicted...

[EricHiggin]

 

Pemalite said:

The Cell was 235.48mm2 and the GPU was even larger at 258mm2. The GPU was larger than the Cell and thus likely more expensive to manufacture and thus your assertion that the PS3 costs were high due to the cell is highly incorrect.
Both chips were fairly conservative in terms of size... But having two moderately sized chips is still expensive.
The Radeon x1900 XTX for instance was a *big* 352 mm2 at the same node and nVidia took it a step farther with the Geforce 8800 Ultra at a whopping 484mm2.
The Xbox 360's chips were smaller and thus cheaper to make than that and it was still a loss leader.
In the end, you are only agreeing with my point anyway, that the days of consoles taking losses on console hardware is over.
Sony is to broke to do it, Microsoft's shareholders aren't happy with it.

When I said cell was expensive I wasn't specifically talking about the actual cost to make each chip. I was looking at it from an overall point of view. The time and investment PS put in with IBM in the design and the manufacturing facility costs PS incurred to make it all happen. That is something PS really doesn't have to worry about with AMD because they take care of most of that and PS just pays for it. Having AMD and other companies taking care of the off the shelf, semi custom manufacturing and Foxconn assembling the console is a big reason why PS4 was able to come in at $399. PS has way less on their plate when it comes to PS4 hardware as a whole.

PS and Sony don't have the backing or the want to try and subsidize again just in case, and I don't blame them either. As long as constant upgrades with reasonable trade in's exist, there's no problem with selling at cost, or even a small profit. Why MS doesn't just subsidize PS into the ground I don't know. They have the means to do so and quite quickly. They would have the performance console market to themselves afterwards, unless Apple or Samsung decided to jump into the ring. I don't want MS to price/push PS out of console gaming, but everyone knows if they really wanted to, they could. Makes me wonder whether XB is mostly a warning to PS to stay away from their Windows/PC market. 

Pemalite said:

AMD doesn't jump on a new node because a "bright and shiny" new console platform is about to be released. They do it when it makes sense and that is usually when it's financially feasible to do so.
If the hardware isn't available to kick start a new generation, then we will not get a new console generation, it really is that simple.
You forget that AMD's primary market is the PC and not the consoles. 
Consoles are just leveraging the massive amounts of R&D and development that is done for the PC market to lower costs and development time. (Which is why you will never see fully custom processors in a console ever again.)
The downside to that is that consoles need to stick with the PC's hardware development cadence.

I wasn't saying AMD will bend over backwards for PS and MS just for their consoles, and no they wouldn't jump to unproven nodes for that reason either. That's not what I meant by finding a solution. I do think AMD would most certainly want to help PS and MS as much as possible because when AMD was hurting, PS and MS jumped on board and have been helping AMD financially to get going again, indirectly.

They aren't the only reason, as Polaris for PC has been a pretty big hit for AMD so far, but treating PS and MS like their just another random customer, who can just take a hike if they don't like it, I don't see happening. It's not like PS and MS have many options to choose from for an x86 CPU and performance GPU, but with Ryzen about to take market share from Intel, leading to falling prices of Intel chips, and whispers of Intel potentially using AMD tech for their SOC's instead of Nvidia, there's nothing saying PS and MS may not look elsewhere in a pinch. AMD is the go to right now of course, but PS and MS aren't completely locked in if they don't want to be.