1. Nope, it's not the foundries, but their clients who decide if it's viable or not for mass-producing their chips.

2. Yes, it is too early. Or why do you think AMD, Intel, NVidia and IBM (I singled out those because they are the only ones who produce chips with more than 100W TDP, which a 4K console APU will consume for sure) still don't have any 7nm chips out, announcing them for 2019-2020? Simply because the 7nm processes are not ready yet for mass production - especially not any 7nm HPP (High Power Plus, which is a general term used for the production quality of the chips for Computer and Server CPUs)

3. FD-SOI is a better bulk process. High performance chips wouldn't make the change to FD-SOI anyway because they couldn't reach the same performance  as they do with more performant processes, which need FinFETs. The article says otherwise but that's not how it went in real life. It also hinted at IoT, or Internet of Things, as it's main use. Those only need a couple of Milliwatt in power consumption and are about as powerful as your cellphone 12 years ago, no comparision with a console APU. For those chips, FinFETs would be a huge waste, so there FD-SOI would make much sense.

4.Learn how chip manufacturing works before you see a price on 14/16nm over 20/22nm and 28/32nm and think it's more expensive to produce chips in that size. Because it isn't.

5. Again, it's not Sony who designs any of these things, they just state what the chips must perform. It's completely up to the manufacturer as on how to get there.

1. Again, 7nm (equivalent to Intel 10nm) is only a tad more expensive than 14/16nm ... (the only reason I can't see Sony not transitioning to 7nm early in it's life is because of physical design costs and not manufacturing costs) 

I guess you took that diagram with the prices at face value, even though those where a) expectations and b) meant for when the chips are at full production, from which the 7nm process is still years away. There's a reason why AMD is still only producing test chips, and why Intel had such many problems and delays with their 10nm process. The Yields on those tests are still miles away from being good enough for being profitable. Oh, and you can't say equivalent if just the raw numbers are similar, they can be lightyears apart in performance.

2. Except PS4 slim doesn't consume 100 watts, it's already sub-100 watt TDP and could become sub-50 watt with 7nm and it's not like they'll need a high powered specialized node either since even the low powered version of 7nm will provide an automatic uplift from the original 28nm design ... 

The 100W was meant for the PS4 at release (134W to be precise, 136W for the Pro in 14nm). A high performance node is needed for high performance hardware like the PS4. Low performance chips are the tings embedded in Routers, Printers and the like. Unless you're going to tell me that the PS4 is nothing but a glorified Blu-Ray player, it's going to need a higher performance process and a very good yield in 7nm to be viable.

3. FD-SOI is dead much to the chagrin of the author of that article ... 

4. The chart is listed as "price per millions of gates", I think you maybe getting confused here since I understood what that clearly entailed ... 

5. Absolutely not true! Sony probably does modify their designs at the logic level since they've included customizations like the ID buffer but you fail to realize that there's more to a chip than just it's logic design and you need the physical design as in the designer will have to port the circuits to the physical geometries of the real chip! (chips are not just created from code but it is also printed as well) It's not completely up to the manufacturer, Sony has to acquire these PDKs (process design kits) from the specific foundries to translate the RTL code to physical design themselves cause fuck knows AMD is probably not allowed to order any significant fab capacity from TSMC ... 

They are asking for those modifications, but again, they are not designing any part of the chips themselves! You fail to realize what it need to have to design the damn things themselves. If Sony could do that, there would be no need to go to AMD and ask them to do so, as AMD isn't producing the chips, only designing them (=fabless) (though in fairness, the CPU would then been a POWER derived chip, not x86-64). The designs are done by AMD, the PDKs have been aquired by AMD, and AMD is producing a lot at TSMC, for instance all their GPU chips and a small part of CPUs and Mainboard chips.

ps4? No

ps5? 100% yes

Bofferbrauer2 said:

They are asking for those modifications, but again, they are not designing any part of the chips themselves! You fail to realize what it need to have to design the damn things themselves. If Sony could do that, there would be no need to go to AMD and ask them to do so, as AMD isn't producing the chips, only designing them (=fabless) (though in fairness, the CPU would then been a POWER derived chip, not x86-64). The designs are done by AMD, the PDKs have been aquired by AMD, and AMD is producing a lot at TSMC, for instance all their GPU chips and a small part of CPUs and Mainboard chips.

Umm, no they can't ? In case you didn't realize AMD has a WSA with Globalfoundaries until 2020 ... 

And NO they do not produce all of their GPU chips at TSMC, the only design that they have in their pipeline using TSMC is Vega 20 but that's intended to be a low volume part and it hasn't released yet ... 

ALL of their CURRENT GPUs in production are using Globalfoundaries 14nm process node and no small part of their CPUs are using TSMC either ... (they aren't using EMIB/Infinity Fabric or some other shit with different chips) 

TSMC just announced it has started volume production of it's 7-nm FinFET node, with "over a dozen of customers with tens of designs" using it. That means you will see 7-nm products en mass later this fall, including as mentioned above Apple's latest A12 SoC. However, both Sony and Microsoft usually like to wait a year or so for issues to work themselves out before switching to a new process. So here is what I think is going to happen:

Feb. 2019 - PlayStation 5 announcement

E3 2019 - Major PS5 push, last of super PS4 exclusives shown. PS5 price & release date announcement

Sep. 2019 - PS4 Super Slim and PS4 Pro Slim announced, both with price drops

October 2019 - PS4 Super Slim using 7-nm processor released at $199 with 500GB HDD

October 2019 - PS4 Pro Slim using 7-nm processor released at $299 with 1TB HDD

November 2019 - PS5 using 7-nm processor released at $399 with 2TB HDD

That would create a pretty unbeatable lineup going into holiday 2019.