Pemalite said:
Low powered Ryzen APU's exist and they have Superior CPU and GPU capabilities to the Playstation 4.
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Yes. Low powered Ryzen APUs exist. No one has argued otherwise. Do they have the right TDP and price to be used in a portable PS4? We don't know that. You believe that's possible, but from what I can see it hasn't been demonstrated.
Pemalite said:
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Yes, obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but if they bear no relevance to today's technology and design principles, they're irrelevant aren't they? It's kinda like a biology teacher teaching their class that humans have 23 chromosomes, and someone interjecting and saying "well actually people with Down Syndrome have an extra chromosome, so that's false!". No, it's still true. While it's just not a hard rule to describe the DNA of every human out there, it still applies to over 99% of humans.
Pemalite said:
If everything is kept ISA compatible, there is generally no issue on that front... Which is why the Xbox One X having a ton of hardware deviations from the base Xbox One, still retains full hardware backwards compatibility. |
My apologies, emulate was not the right word. I meant more "replicate". All I'm asking is an APU that can be packaged in a sub $400 handheld with 1080p screen, and 3+ hour battery. You keep asserting this can be done using custom version's of AMD's existing APUs, so I'm assuming there must be some company out there that is using one of these APUs in a sub $400 handheld with a decent screen resolution and battery life that gets similar performance to a PS4. If there isn't, are you just theorizing that this hypothetically could be done?
Pemalite said:
There is a reason why that has been my largest criticism of the Switch and for the longest time... Xbox One X. With that in mind... 1080P IPS panels (Sure, they are likely to be 6-bit with FRC at the budget end...) are pretty inexpensive and would be the minimum I would opt for. Otherwise Super AMOLED or a derivative could offer 1080P+Power savings over the switch display whilst offering superior contrasts. |
Is "pretty inexpensive" inexpensive enough to fit in a hypothetical BOM of $400 PS4 Portable?
Pemalite said:
If you were to build a 1 Billion transistor chip on 28nm and build that same chip on 14nm, the 28nm chip would likely be cheaper. (Ignoring all other factors of course which muddies the water.) But once you start throwing enough transistors at a chip... Like say 8~ billion of them, the 28nm built chip would become monolithic in size, yields would take a massive nosedive and costs would skyrocket... Whereas on 14nm the chip would still be in the realm of a good size and thus costs. Same goes for 14nm and 7nm. There will reach a point where a chip is large enough that 7nm simply becomes more cost effective. Plus over time costs will naturally go down anyway, so some manufacturers may opt for the initial cost hit. Now ARM manufacturers tend to use the latest node because their chip design library's are relatively simple, so they can optimize the chip layout to increase yields... NAND also used to be thrown onto leading nodes to test the waters for the same reason. Fabrication is a complex topic, so hope I have explained that eloquently enough. |
Fair enough. With all that being said, do you think something like an AMD APU would be more expensive or less expensive on a 7nm process vs a 14nm process for example? If not, where do you think we're currently at in terms of the most cost effective fabrication process that would get us the TDP a mobile PS4 would need to have? If you can't answer something like that with confidence, that's fine.
Pemalite said:
Does it need to be 7nm? (I don't think I have actually asserted the chips needed to be 7nm anyway) |
No of course it doesn't have to be 7nm. It just needs to be the right cost and have the right TDP to make sense in a PS4 portable. I think a lot of this conversation we're having is completely unnecessary because I wasn't arguing against the points that you were making, I was arguing against the points our friend Kev was making. He's the one that believes it's necessary for Sony to use an APU made using a 7nm fabrication process in order to get the TDP necessary for a PS4 portable. He's the one that thinks it would automatically be cheaper to fabricate chips using a 7nm fabrication process. He's the one that thinks Sony can produce a PS4 portable using this 7nm APU for $399 or less as soon as six months from now, and be able to play future PS5 games at a lower resolution/frame rate. I'm pointing out the holes in his nonsense, and you've more or less stepped in and argued on his behalf for some strange reason.