Which will prevail? Xbox Power or Playstation Speed?

[Pemalite]

EricHiggin said:

thismeintiel said:

If the BOM that Forbes estimated was correct (~$450), then $499 should be break even, maybe a tiny profit.  Sony has always sold at a loss.  $449 should be the max we should expect.  Unless MS does price theirs at $599, then they may figure they can get away with a $499 price.  Remember, Sony took at $200+ loss when they felt they had to for the PS3.  I don't think a ~$100 loss is completely out of the question.  Not when this gen is very important to the future of their company.

And MS is not going to try to beat Sony or 100% be only more than them by $50.  Xbox is not a huge pillar in their company.  Satya Nadella does see it as a way to break into streaming, which is his background.  But, they are not in the business of losing millions/billions on HW, again.  If the XBX costs $100 more to make than the PS5, expect it to cost $100-$150 more than the PS5.  This is why the Lockhart existed to begin with.  Series X was to beat Sony with power, but definitely not price.  Lockhart was to beat it with price, definitely not power.  We'll have to see if they actually release the Lockhart, given some of the leaks that some devs aren't exactly excited with having to develop on it if they want to make a XBX game.

Something I just read on a few sites said that SmartShift only works in laptops with separate AMD CPU and GPU. PS5 has SmartShift, so does that mean it's not a monolithic APU? SNY's slides showed a layout much like how AMD's slides do, with separate CPU and GPU and I/O die, which is how Zen 2 is laid out (minus the GPU die). AMD also showed they were working on infinity fabric that allowed for the CPU and GPU to operate together, but for servers. Could PS5 be using a consumer form of this, and could that be cheaper? The smaller chiplets certainly should be a lot cheaper than a large APU, and it would partially explain the much higher GPU clocks as well.

I read your last reply wrong. I thought you said MS would try and keep XBSX close to PS5 cost, but you said it's own costs. Oops. Even if both have monolithic APU's, then XBSX's should cost a lot more. Though the PS5 SSD should cost a bit more than XBSX's, even with slightly less storage space. XBSX also doesn't sound like it's audio portion will cost as much as PS5's either. It's hard to say. While I don't think they'll be the same price, I don't see more than a $100 difference at most. SNY really doesn't like $50 launch pricing. That's why $499 for PS5 and $549-$599 for XBSX make more sense to me. I think that would work better than most may think for PS5. XBSX may only be another $50, but it would be over that $500 mark and that will immediately turn some people off. Unless MS sets the price at $499, then PS has to decide what they want to do, and if they can afford it, they may just bite the bullet and go with the tried and true $399. PS5 specs at $399 would destroy PS4 launch sales, if they aren't hampered by covid.

AMD notebook APU's have smartshift.

starcraft said:

I read that as well, and agree that it is interesting. But again this thread likely overstates the distinction. It wouldn't be enough that Sony can do that. It would have to be the case the the MS console cannot do that. I consider it unlikely that that will be the case, as MS was surely mindful of this in designing its console with two different types of RAM.

Add to that, even in the worst case where the PS5 can somehow achieve this and the Xbox can not, it would be limited to a few very advanced PS5 games, and even then whats rendered on screen would look worse than the most advanced Xbox games - try marketing that!

The Xbox Series X only uses one type of Ram (GDDR6) and only has a single RAM pool.

The difference is due to the mis-matched memory module capacity, the memory addresses of which are exposed in software for developers to leverage.

Memory transactions work in parallel... So if you have a 2GB chip and a 1GB chip... The memory transaction will be twice as fast for the first 2GB, after that... It can only make memory transactions to the last 1Gb of the 2GB chip, halving the speed. (This is the dumb-down explanation anyway.)