You'd be surprised the lenghts companies go to sway online opinion. Shit, you could be a meat bot hired by Nintendo...heck, many of the NX threads could be paid for by Nintendo....but they really don't need to go that far these days, a strategic snowball can end up being a massive avalanche on the net these days. They hire professionals just for this purpose these days. Always suspect a meat bot...fuck, I might be a meat bot working for free and not even know it.

It's a proven fact that companies keep there customers miserable. RETAIL THERAPY (shopping in order to make oneself feel happier) is the way the companies will give you happiness for a price.

Look at how Nintendo trolled new amiibo launches knowing most people would never get to even see one, let alone buy it. Then later on more stock arrives and quickly sells out. (amiibo are happiness).

Marketing wise, this is why SONY is releasing a more powerful PS4. Make your customers miserable with the one they have now and make them happy when they buy the new one.

As I said, my theory is that it's simply not viable to shrink the current architecture, so they have to use one made for 14/16nm finfet to use this process.

But using a same-spec (18CU etc) chip as the old one opens a whole new can of worms, because code written "to the metal" for the old chip won't run as efficiently out of the box (and they certainly don't want every game to need a patch) on the new architecture, so to circumvent this problem they imo always had to throw in additional CUs to make sure the finfet chip can brute force PS4 parity in unpatched games. Doubling the CU count even makes it possible to sell the PS4 Neo at a higher price as long as both version coexist > higher margins.

Due to the enormous differences in structure size between chips made in 28nm and 14/16nm the PS4 Neo APU will certainly have a smaller die size than the current PS4 APU and in the end (when yields have caught up and process costs have sunken due to enough production capacities being available) that's the most important factor for chip price per unit (the more working chips you get from a silicon wafer, the cheaper they are per unit).

at the time they finalised the PS4 they might still have been hopeful to be able to use the 20nm process in the future and there were reports of AMD attempting to make use of that one up until dec 2014, yet it seems that never came to fruition and with that died that option for X1/PS4 APUs aswell

the newest processes even have a changed transistor layout (finfet) afaik effectively making "shrinks" complete redesigns, so that might have been out of the question from the get go

Join the club.

I'm tired of people not understanding or not willing to understand that console game development is very different from PC game development. That somehow it's easy and games will automatically look and run better on NEO and it won't take any resources at all.

Or what incremental console upgrades mean for the future. Short term gain, long term pain.

Games will not release on PS4 as they normally would have. At least 25% to 50% extra QA time just for testing if the same build runs correctly on the faster CPU, memory and GPU. An extra GPU binary is required for NEO. Patches are doubled and need to be synchronized for multiplayer games. All that has to come out of the same budget since it's all selling to the same userbase as before. Either games take even longer to develop or each verion gets less attention than before.

The effects might be small for a big AAA studio, yet a lot more pronounced for a small studio that could only afford to release on 1 console to begin with.


But let people dream on that that $399 NEO box is going to give those GTX 970's a run for their money and every game is magically going to run better. All that counts is better graphics after all.

Haha nice conspiracy theory, plays right into this
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-lichdom-battlemage-is-the-worst-performing-game-weve-tested
I guess that's why Sony let that game through.