Jen-Hsuan repeatedly pointed to the 2004 cross-licensing agreement that NVIDIA entered into with Sony for the development of PlayStation 3 technology as a direct precedent of today's Intel deal. "The Sony agreement has generated more than $500 million in royalties," he said,...

My take on it is that roughly speaking 12 goes into the rough number of PS3 units shipped well enough to assume that Sony pays $12 to Nvidia for every PS3 they make. That is on top of whatever they pay to actually make the RSX chip inside the PS3. Nvidia did pretty well for hawking off an obsolete design with a bare minimum of actual work done to it by them. It probably makes the G70/71 generation even more profitable than their brilliant G80 design.

This is one fixed cost I guess you have to consider for all the console makers since none of them actually designed their internal chips themselves.

 http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/01/intelnvidia-bombshell-look-for-nvidia-gpu-on-intel-processor-die.ars

Source article, mostly unrelated though.

O_o that is insane, SONY really should of tried to get a contract with lower royalties, you would think that $6 per RSX would be adequate given how little R&D should of been. 

I wonder how much Microsoft paid ATIAMD I mean a lot of dev time went into that particular chip from what I have read...

way too much for a chip with a sub-standard 3D performance (at the time of release) and horrendous anisotropic filtering presets (hardcoded into the chip)

a little offtopic but ive been wondering about it for a while -> the power processing element (PPE) that sony and IBM designed for the cell is something that the xbox has to have to run, i wonder if theyre giving royalties to IBM, sony, both and/or possibly toshiba also, anyone know?

It is quite possible that they are paying IBM for their PowerPC I.P. I do know however that they paid for much of the development ahead of time, same with Microsoft so the per unit royalty is thus hard to determine without an explicit statement coming from IBM or Sony about them.

Up front? Who knows?

On a continuing basis? Who knows?

We only know what Sony paid Nvidia because that bastard CEO () told us.

But what I do know is that it is large enough for ATI and Nvidia to both mention it in their financial results so it wouldn't surprise me if its not at least the same if not slightly more or less for Microsoft. Though in Nintendos case the rate may be quite small as the chip is older, thats probably one of the reasons why they went with an older design, it was cheaper.

MS owns the ATI chip...so they probably paid even more than Sony for the RSX.

This risk with Sony is that any day now, Nvidia will announce they are pulling support for the 6 series GPUs and not making them anymore... They tend to do this.  :)

To be honest, I can't believe Sony actually bought this chip. They must have been in such a financial hole from the Cell and bluray that they were willing to take the cheapest solution.

Xenos was pretty much near top of the line when it came out in the 360, and a year later PS3 had a dated and worse RSX. A year in video card timeline is an eternity and for RSX to be inferior, it boggles the mind...

If PS3 came out with something like a 8800GTX as a video card(best video card at PS3 release time)...they would have ass raped the 360 performance wise.

MS still pays ATI royalties on it, and it is big enough for them to mention in their financial results, same as Nvidia.

Oh Sony controls the production of the RSX so I don't think they could pull production. However it also means they paid I don't know how much to shrink it onto each successive process node.