I think you are right we will see not as fast new shrinks, butI believe the reason PS3 hasn't seen another shrink is because Nvidia blocked the fusion of Cell and RSX atleast I think I have read it somewhere.

But pricecuts will still be possible. Ram Densities (or stacked Ram) higher yields, bigger capacities R&D spread over more consoles

I think this Gen will still play out traditiona. 28nm>>20nm->16nm->14nm or something like it. I f Intel can do it its possible to do it. Foundries have to compete against each other and against Intel or else Intel will make all non Intel products obsolete.

But PS5 won't be so lucky and when PS6 comes around everything will be fundamentally different or we will not see anymore progress.

Have you been in a clean room before? Have you fabricated your own products? No? The listen up - it's all sensationalist crap.

It isn't slowing down. If anything, the 40-32nm bridge was harder than what we have. With Intel making their $6 billion clean room factory (!), and ARM designing yet more sub 30nm transistors, there is no problem....for the moment. Sub 15nm and yes, we have an issue which will require some insane engineering, but that is a long way off, and simple restructuring of proc designs will compensate for this, or we could move onto carbon trans, apply graphene in different ways, or use magnetic transistors. What ever the solution, there are solutions.

And no, the cost part is crap. A poor PC back in the mid 1990's cost £800+. Now look how cheap and powerful a £300 laptop is. Hell, most phones are now twice as powerful as my first PC and cost less WITHOUT adjusting for inflation! This is because fabrication techniques are backwards compatible. Being able to produce 22nm trans. means making a 32nm one is almost 100% efficient, hence why electronics deflate in value so quickly.

I am a physicist, I have taken basic EE courses, and of course I follow those news sources who DO have specific experience.

I said Intel was fine and isn't affected yet. Intel is irrelevant to PS4/720. ARM have nothing to do with the fabrication side. Pick better examples if you wish to demonstrate what you are saying.

Yes, different transistor technologies will allow us to progress further than we can see now. But these have much higher R&D costs than the shrinks of the past, because they require more engineers for more time in order to bring into production.

Yes, costs have come down in the last 10 years. I even said, the shrinks during PS2 and PS3 were basically free. It's now that that stops. An HD4850 cost $99 in 2009. Now in 2013, the graphics cards you can buy for $99 are barely any faster.

New shrinks will come slower, and they will NOT be "100% efficient". Look at the 28nm shrink of recent graphics. It's more like 70% area and 50% power reduction, and those ratios will get worse the longer EUV, Finfet and 450mm wafers are pushed back by the foundries.

Do you deny that TSMC won't have 22nm ready in 2013 like they promised? Do you deny that they cancelled Finfet? Do you deny that TI, Renesas, AMD, Fujitsu, Infineon and so on have been forced to go fabless at 45nm or 32nm because of rising costs?

*facepalm*

ARM come up with the method and design which is the whole issue. In labs we can fabricate ~5nm trans (hell, a 7 atom/12 angstroms trans was made), but that is in labs. ARM can design ways of mass producing them which is what the challenge is. So I would do some homework before trying to put someone down.

And the market is bigger and more lucrative than before, due to people wanting computers in their phones.

As for gpu's etc; actually with inflation added, gpus are cheaper eg a 4850s equal, the 6670 is £66.50 and will use less power. Now the 4850 was pretty weak and came in at low end gamer gpu. Just look at this. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+4850  One generation later you get a better card (5670) for a lower price. If you added a few $'s on for inflation, you can get a gtx 650 for $106 which would demolish a HD 4850. Also as I have said, look at RAM. That has pretty much just crashed in price for the last few years. What use to cost £80 now costs £30 at a push. 

No initial shrink is 100% and I did not say this. Iirc, they are viable for marketint at ~30%+ as they work on the concpet of getting it to ~96% within the year. Also you have to reduce power otherwise you will simply burn up the silicon/have thermal runaway. The first sandybridge had this along with the gt 4xx series, but of  course this was solved with simple redesigns of the layout rather than fabrication.

TSMC may not, but Intel are already producing and selling 22nm procs - it's the Ivy Bridge range  :)

Well the GT 600 series is using 28nm, and they will hold off as long as possible simply because they know that large gpu performance boosts can be gained from complex redesigns which are cheaper than shrinking their trans, but this is out of a quest for profit rather than it is too expensive to do. Also there has been no demand for more powerful gpus, and if you can make 2 series of cards rather than one, you'll drag it out for as long as you can.

Good information... now question would be, it is better for the companies to charge higher during launch or lower? if they go higher they can create an artificial price drop faster but that will go very bad with the stock holders, if they go lower they may create a bigger install base but at a great cost that would be hard to overcome because of the reasons mentioned. Higher or Lower?

My opinion? Delay launch another year or more. The tech they want is not viable until then.

@TheJimbo1234

I'm not going to respond to you further, you are either wrong (on ARM having any input in the process nodes a PS4/720 might use) or I've already addressed it (on Intel already having 22nm).

Not going to happen. Giving Nintendo another year, or more, would screw Sony and MS over.

Very interesting. I think you are right. The only thing that would change this is a new chip fabrication process. Who knows what the future holds. The only constant is change. We might end up with cheaper consoles faster if a breakthrough happens.

That is true. If we knew exactly how to make chips smaller today we'd already be doing it. So these roadmaps rely on a series of unknown breakthroughs that might be better than predicted, or perhaps an alternative tech path will rapidly mature (I was speaking to my Materials lecturer on her work on FERAM that's progressing very well).

ARM has nohing to do with the production. They are just customers. The market is bigger due to smartphones yes, this will motivate the foundries to invest in new fabs. And thats good, costs are increasing, if the market would be smaller it wouldn't be good for the progress.

Yields are not as great as they used to be and it takes longer and is harder to achieve good ones . We will see no doubt setbacks and thats Solerons point it might take longer before they have the capacities and yields cheap enough for Nextbox/PS4 to make the jump. And the mobile market might even come in the way. I will go into more detail later.

Redesigns are effective but a shrink improves the performance more. Architectural changes are there to put the transistors to better use but shrinks add Billion new ones in the same space. Which is why the jump in computing performance is the most inbetween shrinks. The following revisions on the same scale are mainly improvments because of improvments in the manufacturing process on the same node and fine tuning aimed to increase eficency.

A dieshrink is only succesful if the customer gets more performance for a Dollar/Watt at the same size. What is possible in a lab on handcrafted chips is not an indication when this will make sense on a large scale or even if.

Nvidia doesn't hold off because they want but because they HAVE TO. There is only so much you can do with a fixed amount of transistors if someone gives Nvidia a better price for the same process later because they can do it ok now, Nvidia can add more transistors, increase clockrates and make a chip bigger and hotter to get a performance boost. Architectutal changes are often just part of the story on how there are performance increases without shrinking the chip . But the real jump and money is  in the die shrinks. Nvidia improves architecture instead of shrinking because there is no other way. 

Normally Nvidia and AMD could have jumped right to the superior Version on the same process in the past. Instead of GTX 480 we would get GTX 580 instead of GTX 680 the 780. AMD the same usually all 18 months we should get twice the transistors or the power of a Dual GPU like GTX 690  18 months later in a GTX 780 with similar price and same power the GTX 680 once had. But now the thing.The GTX 680 is not a GTX 680 its way smaller than its predecessors, actually the Geforce Titan is the GTX 680 but they just weren't able to get enough Chips for Tesla and Geforce so they simply skipped it until it was possible for them to sell it on the PC gaming market.

Titan should have released February 2012 at the price of a GTX 680 and for Christmas 2013 we should get a GTX 780 with the power of 2 Titans and the size of one. Moores law is broken for a while now. And this is not some kind of marketing strategy. Thats bad for the whole Industry. Overall progress slows down and people would buy more often new stuff, if it was clearly superior and the steps bigger, its also not just games.

The market is there for more and more GPU performance. Its not just PC gamers who drive the market. Its governments. private industries

You know why The Nvidia Titan is called Titan and is so late to the party ? Its because the card has the chip of a Nvidia Tesla K20X and a supercomputer called Titan needed 20000 of them.

There is a big market for endless computing power and it has nothing to do with games. The highend GPU market for PC games is just a side business a lot of professionals and  significant parts of the economy, need huge computing performance for their jobs and price is only a secondary or non factor to them. 

Nvidia/AMD are forced to drag their gens out as much as possible. Mobile Chips have an advantage they are low power and yields are easier to achieve, same goes for RAM. But mid or high powered wafers are a much bigger problem to produce and take much longer to get it profitably done.

The higher the power and the smaller the process, the thinner the walls the more likely that there will be leakage.So its really a question of how long it takes until its possble to produce and when they have the capacities to cater to Sony/MS. Also they must offer to produce for the right price, and other markets like mobile have more weight to throw in the ring. There is a fixed amount of production capacties and companies fight for them. 

To the topic again:

The thread raises good points and problems will increase in the future. Intel is the exception its like a light of hope shining alone in the dark.

But as I said before this Console gen should still be fine. Potential Price reductions where probably number 1 on Sonys list. 

1 Chip instead of two. less silicon than RSX+Cell. Less Mainboard complexity.

Less frequency no need to wait for high power silicon to be ready at a certain manufacturing process. This makes shrinks more likely and faster useful than a 4GHZ Cpu.

Just one Memory pool means one Memory controller. They also went for GDDR5 which is actually superfast DDR3 but it can be replaced later with low power 1024bit stacked DDR3 also increased densities for said ram.

Fixed function processors keep the APU size low and give more power efficency.

The potential to shrink the PS4 is much higher. There might be problems with manufacturing processes in the future  but Sony and MS designed their consoles with that in mind. They won't be as dependant on die shrinks regarding APU as much. Start out much better and in the case od Sony there are big potential in saving energy/size on the GDDR5. It runs at 5.5 ghz and eats alot of power takes massive space  stacked DDR3 solves both once the technology is available on broader scale.

 Also :  http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-14nm-Ivy-Bridge-Haswell,20602.html Massproduction in 2013

If the other manufacturers make it financially viable for Sony/MS to produce in 14nm in the next 5-6 years PS4 and 720 will be small and eco friendly with several pricecuts inbetween. At 14nm the Apu would be 100mm2 or even less. Its said to be 350mm2. Cell+RSX were 500mm  

 I agree it will be slower and more problematic to shrink sruff I also think they took everything into account while designing the consoles and kept a high enough pricereduction potential.. 

But its also not an obvious walk in the park or predetermined. Moores law might not collapse as in progression will be still good enough, but there are so many roadblocks up ahead that it will keep suffering. Its evident for years that the Industry runs in the direction of a brickwall. Some things will help to avoid it for a while. However  graphene and stuff like this might not be ready in time and are not really adressing the problem thats up ahead. The reason why atleast smartphones show progress resembeling the past development in the PC area is because they are low powered.