| Intrinsic said: It depends on chip fabrication. It took 4yrs to go from 65nm to 28nm fabrication. And 6yrs to go from 2nm to 14nm. And about 4yrs to go from 14nm to 7nm (assuming there are no surprises). If it takes 7yrs for that node shrink to come? then that will be PS6 we are talking about. |
Though i think it's very likely, this is the most important point. There would have to be at least some intermediate step. Next gen consoles will probably start with 8nm/7nm process, and that means console makers will need smaller manufacturing processes that also need to be cost effective.
Right now we're even quite a bit away from 7nm/8nm high performance. Intels 10nm hasn't work as planned so far and minor steps like 12nm bring only minor improvements. Global Foundries even pulled out of 7nm manufacturing.
With 7nm being that difficult and showing many delays again, 4nm could be very far away. That way future hardware generations could either last way longer and we might see midgen updates, but only after quite some time. Or the console makers won't pull out further mid gen updates. But in that case the gen after nextgen might be not that much more powerful.
By the way, this isn't a consoles only problem. If you look at PC-GPU's the steps between generations get smaller and smaller. Without realtime raytracing the current GeForce GTX 20X0 would have been rather disappointing.
