Squilliam said:
HappySqurriel said:
| Squilliam said:
Why wouldn't they be able to release a console for $399 which consumes say 150W at the wall? They can already sell the Xbox 360 which consumes about 100W for $249 for a profit so why couldn't they sell a console for $149 more with even more advanced technology and come close to breaking even? You don't know how Nintendo arrived at their cost structure or how they allocated their fixed costs and you don't know the listing price or if any early subsidies will apply for the Xbox/Playstation consoles and yet you claim that they can't release a console which is significantly more powerful by merely taking advantage of up to date technology?
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They could release a system for $399 that consumest 150W but I doubt it would have the same processing power advantage Microsoft had with the XBox 360 over the Wii ...
To maintain that large of a gap Microsoft would need to be using one of the top of the line GPUs that alone use more than 150 Watts. There really is only 1 GPU on the market from AMD that can offer 8 times the performance of the XBox 360 and has low enough energy consumption to be used in a console (The Radeon 7970M), and that would only maintain the advantage Microsoft had if you assume that Nintendo didn't choose one of the many laptop or embedded GPUs that can offer 2 to 3 times the performance of the XBox 360 under their size and cost constraints.
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A chip which is a little slower than the HD 7850 would deliver around 8* the GPU shader performance of the Xbox 360 and on a mature 28nm process that is pretty plausible. They can easily devote a large proportion of the power budget to the GPU because the CPU in the Xbox 360 was a dog in comparison to current designs in performance/W such as the jaguar cores from AMD which only use a few watts per core and deliver better performance. The rumoured inclusion of low power/high performance CPU cores and memory architectures (DDR4) means that they can devote more energy towards putting prettier pictures on the screen.
I doubt that one single 250-300mm^2 die in would break the bank in comparison to the dual similar sized dice the current generation consoles launched with and the use of generic technologies like DDR4 and Blu Ray ought to control costs further.
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The Xenos is reported to have 240 GFLOPS of processing power, the Radeon HD 7850 is reported to have 1761.28 GFLOPS of processing power (7.388 times the Xenos) and consumes 130 Watts of electricity under load. To get the Radeon HD 7850 to a reasonable level of power consumption to release a 150 Watt console you would probably see its processing power reduced to 6 times that of the Xenos.
Having studied AMD's GPUs trying to predict the Wii U's chipset, the best options for a console at this point in time is their mobility line of GPUs (because their desktop GPUs run too hot). For Nintendo, the most likely similar GPUs are the Radeon 7950M, 7630M to 7690M, because they draw less than 25 Watts under load, have 480 stream processors, are manufactured using a 40nm process, and are designed using the Turks core; and these processors have between 450 GFLOPS and 700GFLOPS of processing power (two to three times the Xenos).
The top of the line GPU from AMD, with their best performance per watt, is the Radeon 7970M running at 75Watts and producing 2TFLOPS of processing power (roughly 8 times the Xenos and 3 to 4 times the likely Wii U GPU range). It is an expensive GPU but not (necessarily) too expensive for a console unless that system comes bundled with an expensive "controller" like the Wii U tablet or Kinect. Expecting much beyond that is not realistic because I doubt AMD can produce a more efficient GPU at this point in time, using (much) more electricity will result in a console which simply runs too hot, and the cost of the GPU would already be pushing the limits of what you could realistically expect Microsoft to spend.
