John Kodera: “PS4 Is Entering The Final Stages Of It’s Life-Cycle.”

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

While they will be produced in 7nm, they will be priced high early on because it takes time to master a production node. Yield rates are pretty bad early on, which necessitates to sell chips at a high price to offset this - hence why a new node is generally started with high-end or server hardware to gobble up the high costs early on. If Sony wants a Zen2 based 8-core processor and a GPU with 64 compute units, you could be pretty damn sure that combo alone would cost Sony in 2019 about the expected 499$ release price of the PS5 without any other parts included.

They usually get around that issue by not building monolithic sized chips that are extremely complex.

And often a new node is used on small ARM chips, not server chips... I mean shit. TSMC's 7nm process already has a ton of partners signed up using the process, majority are all pretty much ARM chips with big x86 and GPU's coming later.

That's always a bulk process, not a HPP (High Power Plus) process as needed for PCs, Consoles and servers. Bulk processes are ready earlier because they are less complex but in return also much less powerful. For High Power processes server chips or High-End GPU are generally the way to go. Hence why the x86 and GPU production at TSMC is coming later: Their High Power Process is not yet in production, only their Bulk processes.

Edit: The problem with not building monolithic is small with CPU (mainly just higher latency), but not nearly so easy to solve in GPU. Navi is potentially (and hopefully) coming with a solution to this problem, otherwise it will need a pretty big GPU - bigger in square mm than PS4 Pro by around 50% even though produced in a 7nm process just to get a chip powerful enough to get enough distance between itself and the Pro. This would not only be pretty expensive for a console chip due to it's size, but also a pretty large heat producer

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 23 May 2018