DF Justifying the X1X Price Point

[haxxiy]

JRPGfan said:

haxxiy said:

10-12 TF is indeed very feasible for the power envelope of a console on 7 nm. However, I'm slightly concerned with profitability at $399 since the cost per mm2 on a chip is increasing with every die shrink. A 300 mm2 chip on 7 nm might cost as much as a 400 mm2 chip on 14 nm, and Zen-like cores are huge, about 11 mm2 on 14 nm versus ~3 mm2 for the Jaguars on the same node.

Of course, I'm sure the folks at Sony and AMD are very aware of that and might be coming up with smart solutions that doesn't involve scaling down their next generation console way too close to the XOX and even the PS4 Pro for comfort. Maybe even two smaller separate dies on the same lid - say, a 100 mm2 CPU and a 200 mm2 GPU - is going to be cheaper than a single 300 mm2 design. AMD already has a similar technology on Infinity Fabric to make it work like a single die.

 

http://techreport.com/news/31402/amd-touts-zen-die-size-advantage-at-isscc

4 Cores, 8 Threads = 44mm²

Its gonna be less than that at 7nm.

Thats all they need 8 threads, and they should be backwards compatabile if they want.

With the IPC increase from Jaguar -> Zen+, that should be a huge upgrade in cpu performance.

 

That along with some newer Navi chip? around 10 Tflops... is my guess of what Playstation 5 looks like.

Im guessing GDDR6 is used (its faster, uses less power than GDDR5/GDDR5x), supposedly releaseing in 2018, by 2020 it should be cheap.

Playstation 5: (my guess)

Zen+ 4core/8thread ~3ghz

Navi GPU tech (10-12 Tflops)

16GB GDDR6

1TB 7200 RPM HDD (maybe by then 10,000 rpm is cheap enough?)

399$  & releases in 2020.

4 large cores at 3 GHz will consume 40-50W even at a smaller node, it will be far more feasible to have 8 cores at 2 GHz and consume around 30 W. The lesser PSU / cooling requirement and greater computing power will likely strongly outweight a slight increase on the  APU, not to mention native backwards compatibility, maybe?

Otherwise I very much agree with you, except about the pricing of certain components  like RAM decreasing (take for instance DDR4, its price has gone up consistently on the last two years). It's the same reason I don't think the Switch will ever have a pricecut, it competes directly with a very demanding mobile industry for its components.