If you know what a big deal it would be and the problems it would cause, why do you need proof? The proof is simple common sense. COULD a company do it? Sure, but it would not be pretty. WOULD a company do it? IIRC the only company to have done it is SEGA and they don't make hardware anymore.

These manufacturing and delivery contracts are never accessible to people outside the loop (for obvious reasons). Your only proof is to get your hands on one. These contracts are not sheets of paper, they are/can be books the size of bibles (and detail everything down to the last screw about the why, where, when, what and who). Mass manufacturing works on three principles. One is the more you order, the cheaper it gets. The next one is the earlier you order, the cheaper it gets. The last one is penalties for changes drastically increase the closer you get to actual delivery (if you cancel your hotel reservation the day you should be checking in, you won't get your money back - it very likely is the same with electronics). That was true when I was involved in various mass manfacturing deals and will still be true in the year 3000. Typically "uncritical stuff" is ordered years ahead of actual delivery (As a good example, I think memory for the XBox360 was ordered three years before delivery). It also depends if you can guesstimate how prices will evolve over the years, this is a game of many factors but typically you never ever want to mass order anything closer than six to twelve months before actual use (the differences between last minute order and early order can be factors of three to five). Particularly in electronic engineering those contracts are extremely complex to work out (translation: takes hoards of lawyer and months of discussions), as your cpu/gpu design breaks just not enough design rules to get away with the fab rules.

Changing a cpu is of course out of the question for several reasons. The cpu and gpu are the absolute first choices that are made since they are the key elements. These choices are never made by answering the question "what are/will be the coolest things out in the pc world", but by the question "What can we do with the money/square mm we are given". Add to the fact that the 28nm lines are "fully loaded" (there aren't too many anyways) - there is no day off for the engineers at tsmc/gf.

rolls eyes*

I guess it's my fault for trying to teach someone who wouldn't understand without links. Again, and I'm sure most of you would like to believe that I'm dumb and don't understand the concepts involved, I was just looking for "confirmation" (as chark felt the need to argue semantically).

My position is the same as yours. I'm trying to explain this to someone, and they don't believe me and demand links for proof. The difference is, I have a brain, and he doesn't, but that obviously was my first mistake.

These kinds of deals are shrouded in secrecy with NDAs for every step of the proccess you are not going to get that kind of source. Not specifically talking about production details of a console's CPU/GPU. The closest you will get is something like this http://semiaccurate.com/2013/01/02/xbox-next720-silicon-production-day-arrives/.