| gemini_d@rk said: It does not seem that you evaluate new consoles by the perspective of consoles, but of pc. A console has to be popular, and for that, it has to be cheap to be sold on a large scale. Ps5 / xtwo base, it has to cost up to 399 at launch, anything that comes above it, say 499 or 599 will get stranded miserably. Think about what you can do with this price 399 then mount the hardware on top of that. 24/32 gb ram, 512 gb ssd are expensive pieces, unless the console costs 599 and still at a loss, it will not happen. It would make a lot more sense to say let's say with a basic ps5 for mass 399 and a ps5 pro 599 for enthusiasts, but this in terms of launch production would be terrible. |
Thats the thing though...... why MUST it be $399. I think sony and MS can get away with launching consoles at $499 in 2020.
They could sell 13M of them at that price on the first year in the market, then drop it to $399 sometime in 2021.
And no, 512GB SSDs are nowhere as expensive anymore as you seem to think. I just mentioned in a previous post that you can get a 250GB nvme SSD for as little as $100. And a 500GB sata SSD for again, $100. And thats amazon pricing..... it would cost significantly less for sony/ms when looking at volume OEM pricing. In retrospect, back in 2013 a 500GB HDD retailed for around $80, but cost sony around $25 at volume OEM pricing.
I think a lot here are actually making a mistake here which is in truth the opposite of what you are alluring to. They are understating the amount of sway an OEM has on pricing for a product when they come and play an order for 40M of them spanning over 2 years allowing for renegotiation. Whatever something cost at retail, just imagine that it would cost sony/MS les than half or in some cases even as much as a quater of that price as an OEM making volume orders. For better or for worse.
| haxxiy said: More exotic numbers such as 18 or 20 GB would make little sense as well given the size of memory nodes and the number of ROPs of a GPU (with the possibility, of course, for separate nodes of cheaper memory for OS etc.).
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No. You couldn't be more wrong on this point. I mean we are talking about consoles here, which regardless of how many off the shelf parts they use are all still very very custom architectures.
You must it sound like tehre must be 8, 12 or 16.....etc memory modules flanking an APU for it to work properly. There doesn't, if using 2GB GDDR6 modules, 18GB will simply mean 9 ram modules (1 more than the 8 in the PS4 right now) on the PCB or 10 modules for a 20GB set up. I am sure if that is their intention getting the APU and memory to play nice would be the least of their problems.
Now I will reiterate, I am not saying we are going to see 20GB, 24GB or even 32GB of ram in these systems.... I could never know that. I am just saying that a loty of this is not as "impossible" as some of us here are making it sound. There are tons of ways around these things when you start looking at it form the perspective of an OEM and stop looking at it form that of a PC consumer. This is not saying that trends affects consumers in the markets now will not somehow filter up to OEMs too, but it will be nowhere as bad as it is hitting the consumers.
