Can Sony afford to make PS5 more expensive than PS4 launch price?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

 

Bofferbrauer2 said:
Basically everything. Just check what Nintendo can manage to get out of their hardware even though in raw power it's massively lagging behind since the Wii. This doesn't only count for graphics directly, but also other things like texture compression and anything hanging on recurring algorithms.

Nintendo's games aren't graphical powerhouses, they haven't been for generations.
But they do have some of the best artists in the industry, that is undeniable.

Games like Xenoblade Chronicles X where thought to be impossible on the Wii U's hardware, both in size and graphical capacities. Same with the physics in BotW. Nintendo isn't the only one who can manage to do these things, but's most visible with them due to their lower power compared to their competitors. Many late PS360 games would have been thought impossible before due to the small RAM, for instance. It's part of squeezing every inch of power out of a hardware set.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Less than that and it won't have enough to differentiate itself from the PS4 Pro or the XOX. Even in 7nm that will need a pretty big chip, and the bigger the chip, the more expensive it gets, nearly exponentially so in fact.

Indeed. AMD also recognized this, so you know what they did? They used a fabric to stitch together smaller chips that have orders-of-magnitude better yields.
And thus costs were lowered substantially, more working chips you get out of a wafer, the better.

I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen took a similar multi-chip approach.

Wouldn't help at all. The approach was good - for the Server chips! An 8-core Ryzen actually ain't much smaller than a native intel 8-core chip, and the difference in size mainly comes from the Intel 8-cores having much more L3 cache ( Core i7 5960X/i7 6900K have 20MB, 7820X clocks in at 11MB, compared to the 8MB of Ryzen) since they derive from. In Servers, where Intel comes with a 28-core behemoth, having 4x8 cores instead is a massive manufacturing advantage, but in the sizes of desktop/console chips, this doesn't make a difference at all. I mean, AMD could come theoretically come with 4 dualcores with each having 512kB L2 and 2MB L3 cache, but I very much doubt they will. Because it wouldn't help at all in production, what is won in such small scale chips is lost again by the redundancies that need to be build into each chip (which makes a 4x2 cores bigger than a native 8-core)

Bofferbrauer2 said:

DRAM is not artificially inflated, the prices are high because there's simply not enough production capacity worldwide for those chips. Hopefully this will change next year when some fabs come online, but it might still not be enough if demand keeps growing like it does right now.

Oh. They are artificially inflated. Fabs switched production from DRAM to NAND.

We may actually have an oversupply of NAND soon, which means more fabs will switch back to fabricating DRAM.

https://epsnews.com/2017/11/07/samsung-end-tight-dram-supply-earlier-expected/
https://epsnews.com/2017/09/22/expect-tight-dram-supply-2018-possible-oversupply-nand-flash/

Fabs switched because DRAM was too long too cheap and drove the manufacturers to either change production or face bankruptcy. Some where big enough to do both, and those where who stayed. At the time where they did the switch, NAND Flash was still very new and expensive, so for those who couldn't live from their DRAMs anymore it was a pretty easy way out as they didn't need to change much in terms of machinery. When the market then exploded, there where simply not enough manufacturers left in that domain, and having the biggest DRAM fab in south east asia being totally flooded (as in submerged under several meters of rainwater) when the demand started to rise again didn't help matters, either. There is no artificial demand inflation, just the fact that demand was much lower a couple of years ago - too low to feed all the producers at the time.

If NAND really will get oversupplied, then we will have a reversal of the situation pre-2015, where DRAM was oversupplied and NAND in short supply. This might incite the same movement like it did back then, just from NAND to DRAM this time around.