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Intrinsic on 19 August 2020
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Bofferbrauer2 said:

Those nand memory chips in the PS4 are so much faster that they need much more expensive chips to reach those speeds, and there are more of them. It's probable that PS5 will need MLC or even SLC chips while the XSX can do with the much cheaper TLC chips. Add to this the way it has been integrated into the system; there's much more to this than just installing faster chips. The way it's integrated sounded like it would need PCBs with more layers, and those quickly add up in price.

The APU was the biggest cost in times of hard drives, but that's not always true with an SSD. Just compare the price of 1TB HDD vs 1TB SSD. You can get a WD Blue for about 35€, but an NVMe SSD of that size will cost you at least around 100€, and more like 150€ minimum if you want something closer to the touted speeds.

So yeah, those Nands and how they are integrated into the PS5 can make a whole lot of difference to the price.

You are wrong on all counts.... :)

  1. PS5 is using 12 NAND chips connected to 12 channels. Each channel pushes 450MB/s. XSX uses 4 or 8 channels with 4 or 8 NAND chips respectively. Each pushing 600MB/s or 300MB/s respectively. Its not the NAND chips that make them fast, its the number of channels they are linked to or the number of chips they are using. This doesn't make the PCB more complex either, just means you are printing more pathways for the channels. This is different from printing more layers. Kinda like RAM

    Also, both companies are using DRAM-less flash controllers, with the PS5 building in SRAM into their APU for the SSD to bypass having to use DRAM and the XSX using some of its system RAM instead. So this doesn't make their SSD more expensive, it does make their APU bigger than it would have otherwise been though and in turn more expensive. 

  2. With regards to the cost.. it just doesn't work that way.

    Let's start with the cost of a PS4 HDD in 2013, it cost them $37. Now even if sony were just using off the shelf SSD in their PS5, they would be spending no more than $50 for each one. But they aren't, all sony is doing is buying generic NAND flash chips and a 12 lane flash controller and building the SSD themselves. Basically, they are building an SSD and slapping an APU onto the same PCB. If $50 would have given them NAND flash chips, a DRAM and a flash controller, how much do you think just the nand chips and the controller would cost?

    But where this gets even more interesting... PS5 has a rumored BOMof $450. That's $70 more than the $380 PS4. We aren't just saying PS5 SSD is more expensive so we are adding $40 to the overall BOM because there was an HDD in the BOM of the PS4, so all we are doing is adding $3 to the $37 for the PS4 HDD back n 2013 and you have the $40 that the NAND flash chi and the flash controller is going to cost sony in 2020.

    Now do the same for everything else, ad some to the APU, some to the RAM...etc.

As I said, there is nothing special about the components being used in these machines, whats is special is the implementation or better put, how the systems are engineered. And its not engineering that is coming at a cost, its engineering that is making things cheaper than they otherwise would have been. And something that can only be accomplished in consoles.