First, I love how my post was about how the technology isn't there and then in response, you go about talking about hypothetical chips that do not exist that supposedly proves it does.

"Gaming first hardware" is hardware that focuses on gaming first - like the Switch - you know, that handheld that annoys you because Nintendo decided to focus on gaming first and not cell-phone functionality. Wanting more from "gaming first" hardware is asking for it to not be "gaming first" hardware. The Switch would not be "Gaming First Hardware" if you could play YouTube, Netflix and make phone calls on your Switch before you could have voice chat during network play. Make sense?

You still don't get it about the hardware do you? I think this must be one of those cases where you don't know enough to know how much you don't know. I'm not quite sure why you think Sony can work with AMD and both increase the performance and decrease the power draw. Increasing performance increases power draw. You're acting like Sony can just take something like the 2300U, increase a little of this, decrease a little that, and blammo! PS4 APU with a 12W TDP, and about the same price as the PS4's current APU. Sorry, it's not that simple. Decreasing power draw decreases performance. You might be able to take a more... bleeding edge approach to the design, the that will almost undoubtedly decrease yields and blow up the cost of the chip. Working chips pay for dead ones. That's how it works.

This isn't rocket science. Yet you're advocating for a higher performance, lower TDP chip, presumably for the same price seeing as you think Sony can make this PS4 portable for less than $400 even accounting for the fact that any memory and storage solution would be undoubtedly higher than what's in the PS4 and the fact that it would have to have a 1080p screen and a battery. It doesn't add up.

Furthermore, where do you think I to supposed to logically land going from 14 nm to 7 nm? What are you basing that off of? If you're basing it on previous advancements, such as say going from 20 nm to 14 nm, is it still reasonable to apply here? Do we know enough about this new 7nm fabrication process to be able to predict what kind of TDP improvement we should get? Will that 7nm process be stable enough to produce cost-effective yields in the next year or so?  What kind of modifications (if any) can  AMD make to the design of the chip to make it power efficient than their current offeringgs? How much customization (if any) will AMD have to make to account for the modifications the PS4's APU has, and how will that affect TDP, power and yields?  You have to have a very good idea what the answer is to all of these questions before you can confidently say that this chip can be made in 2019 for the price you think it can be made for. And I'm not even getting into the current global supplier issues that is jacking up the prices of new electronics and computer hardware across the globe that might mean that no manufacturer is willing to make the chip for what they made similar chips before.

Remember, you're talking about hardware that currently does not exist, yet you're talking about it as confidently as you would be if  you have intimate knowledge of an actual design, seen the yields of the fabrication process, and have seen it working with your own eyes.

P.S.I'm just not going to bother touching how confident you are that these "spin off" games are far less appealing than their core counterparts. Just look at the history of Nintendo's portable game lineup and note the hundreds of millions sold.

No need. Honestly they should focus on improving VR and PS5 and nail that launch.

And again; closer to Sony and Microsoft's last gen consoles.

It really is. And I have already talked indepth prior on these forums on why it is technically impossible.
I did expect more from Digital Foundry especially when it comes to assertions such as these.

Consoles typically use semi-custom designs, Thus the "Hypothetical" chips generally don't exist until they hit the market anyway.
There is only one exception that comes to mind though... The Switch.

Not always. Back in the Dothan/Bonais days... Intel was rapidly increasing chip performance to save on power draw... As the mantra of "Hurry up and finish and go back to idle" was a key point in chip design philosophy... In short the faster the chip, the faster it can get the processing task done and the faster the chip can go to idle, switch to a lower power state and save on power.

The 2300U is a baseline of what to expect with AMD's current technology on the current fabrication process with it's current chip designs.
Obviously a semi-custom design will be tweaked to meet various goals.

There would not for instance be a need to have the CPU's operate at such a high clock and thus voltage (Remember, voltage has a direct relationship with power consumption!)  as Zen is significantly more efficient than Jaguar. I mean significant.

* It wouldn't have to have a 1080P screen. Super Sampling is a thing you know.

The Playstation 4 SoC is based on Graphics Core Next 1.0, which is slow, old, power hungry and inefficient.
Vega is leagues ahead of it in every scenario. (And probably more so once AMD sorts out it's Primitive Shaders and Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer bullshit.)

Early reports are placing the 7nm process at a 2.6x improvement over 14nm.

TSMC was pegging their 7nm process to be a 1.63x improvement over their 10nm process, which in turn had a 14nm BEOL.
TSMC's 16nm process had a 20nm BEOL.

You need to keep in mind that these aren't actually 7nm and 14nm fabrication processes though, they have been bastardized into advertising numbers to trick the less educated.

But the improvement from TSMC's 16nm to 7nm is bloody massive. Global Foundries, Samsung and so on are seeing similar improvements.
The jump to "7nm" is probably going to be one of the most significant fabrication improvements we have seen in a long time.

Is this hypothetical? Or do you want a list? I can provide a list.

Sure, consoles use semi-custom designs. The key there being semi-custom, you know, meaning a customized version of something that actually exists. Except in this case it would be a semi-custom design of something that doesn't yet exist that people are assuming exists secretly, or will exist within the next 6-18 months or so, and be at a price point comparative to current APUs. Kev here is acting like there's a decent chance Sony already has this all nailed down and could be announcing it at E3.

Well wonderful that you found an exception to a broadly established rule of thumb per se. Unless you're advocating that it would make any sense to design a PS4 mobile APU that is design to spend as much time idling as possible, please make your case, and if not, why bother bringing it up?

You keep talking like it's just arbitary to effectively emulate something closely resembling the PS4's APU on something like a 2300U, with the appropriate TDP and cost, do you have an examples of something similar being done using similar technologies, or is this just something that you think hypothetically should be easily manageable?

I mean, it kinda would have to have a 1080p screen, maybe not in the the "they could make it work on a 720p screen" but definitely in the "how in the fuck are we going to market device for a target audience that definitely won't accept a 720p screen on a handheld  in 2019 for $400.?"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12677/tsmc-kicks-off-volume-production-of-7nm-chips

"TSMC’s CLN7FF process technology will rely on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography with argon fluoride (ArF) excimer lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. As a result, the world’s largest contract maker of semiconductors will be able to use existing manufacturing tools to make 7 nm chips. Meanwhile, to keep using DUV lithography the company and its customers have to use multipatterning (triple and quadruple patterning), which increases design and production costs as well as product cycles."

If I'm reading this correctly (and forgive me as I am not anywhere close to an expert at these manufacturing processes) it appears to me that TSMC's 7nm process might actually be more expensive than previous fabrication processes? Doesn't that fly in the face of previous claims about how much you can expect such an APU based on this technology to cost? Let's also keep in mind that production of these chips is only getting underway right now, and they plan on ramping up production of different 7nm processes oeer the next year or so. If Sony is going to produce a PS4 portable, the window for releasing it more than likely shuts firmly as soon as the PS5 releases, so unless these new hypothetical 7nm AMD 2300 APUs, and/or PS4 portable semi-custom APU is one of the 18 customer products being manufactured in 2018, or having it manufactured by one of the other producers ASAP, this hypothetical handheld would most likely be released in 2019-2020, which falls squarely in PS5 territory. The Vita experienced very similar issues launching a year before the PS4. People didn't really see the appeal of paying $100 less than a PS4 to play dated-looking ports of PS3 games. Wouldn't a PS4 portable have to endure similar challenges?

Considering AMD doesn't currently have any 7nm APUs they're offering to the public, it's going to be pretty hard to improve on something that doesn't exist. But if you think you're up for improving an APU that might not currently exist and whose design definitely isn't public, please go ahead. I'm very curious how you would improve something you can't possibly know enough about. Why don't you tell me how you'd simultaneously improve the fuel economy and  BHP of the 2019 Toyota Supra while you're at it.

I never argued that point, all I took issue with is calling the Switch ports of Doom and Wolfenstein II "dialed back to last gen" which just isn't true.

Low powered Ryzen APU's exist and they have Superior CPU and GPU capabilities to the Playstation 4.
The only issue they have is bandwidth, they would likely need a redesign of the memory controller to take advantage of HBM/GDDR5/GDDR5X/GDDR6.

I brought it up because there was an exception to the rule. - You cannot assert something is true when there are cases of it being false.

I'm not talking emulation. Nor would it be required. Thus I am not obligated to provide examples on how "it's done".
If everything is kept ISA compatible, there is generally no issue on that front... Which is why the Xbox One X having a ton of hardware deviations from the base Xbox One, still retains full hardware backwards compatibility.

I am a massive advocate for higher resolution screens. If the device doesn't have a 2560x1440 display at a minimum, regardless if it's a 5.5" display or a 32" display... I generally have no interest in it.
There is a reason why that has been my largest criticism of the Switch and for the longest time... Xbox One X.

With that in mind... 1080P IPS panels (Sure, they are likely to be 6-bit with FRC at the budget end...) are pretty inexpensive and would be the minimum I would opt for.
Otherwise Super AMOLED or a derivative could offer 1080P+Power savings over the switch display whilst offering superior contrasts.

All newer fabrication processes are generally more expensive. That is how things go.

If you were to build a 1 Billion transistor chip on 28nm and build that same chip on 14nm, the 28nm chip would likely be cheaper. (Ignoring all other factors of course which muddies the water.)
But once you start throwing enough transistors at a chip... Like say 8~ billion of them, the 28nm built chip would become monolithic in size, yields would take a massive nosedive and costs would skyrocket... Whereas on 14nm the chip would still be in the realm of a good size and thus costs.

Same goes for 14nm and 7nm. There will reach a point where a chip is large enough that 7nm simply becomes more cost effective.
Plus over time costs will naturally go down anyway, so some manufacturers may opt for the initial cost hit.

Now ARM manufacturers tend to use the latest node because their chip design library's are relatively simple, so they can optimize the chip layout to increase yields... NAND also used to be thrown onto leading nodes to test the waters for the same reason.

Fabrication is a complex topic, so hope I have explained that eloquently enough.

Does it need to be 7nm? (I don't think I have actually asserted the chips needed to be 7nm anyway)
What's wrong with one of the iterative "advertising" nodes like 12nm, 11nm,10nm and so on which show improvements over 14nm?

Yes. Low powered Ryzen APUs exist. No one has argued otherwise. Do they have the right TDP and price to be used in a portable PS4? We don't know that. You believe that's possible, but from what I can see it hasn't been demonstrated.

Yes, obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but if they bear no relevance to today's technology and design principles, they're irrelevant aren't they? It's kinda like a biology teacher teaching their class that humans have 23 chromosomes, and someone interjecting and saying "well actually people with Down Syndrome have an extra chromosome, so that's false!". No, it's still true. While it's just not a hard rule to describe the DNA of every human out there, it still applies to over 99% of humans.

My apologies, emulate was not the right word. I meant more "replicate". All I'm asking is an APU that can be packaged in a sub $400 handheld with 1080p screen, and 3+ hour battery. You keep asserting this can be done using custom version's of AMD's existing APUs, so I'm assuming there must be some company out there that is using one of these APUs in a sub $400 handheld with a decent screen resolution and battery life that gets similar performance to a PS4. If there isn't, are you just theorizing that this hypothetically could be done?

Is "pretty inexpensive" inexpensive enough to fit in a hypothetical BOM of $400 PS4 Portable?

Fair enough. With all that being said, do you think something like an AMD APU would be more expensive or less expensive on a 7nm process vs a 14nm process for example? If not, where do you think we're currently at in terms of the most cost effective fabrication process that would get us the TDP a mobile PS4 would need to have? If you can't answer something like that with confidence, that's fine.

No of course it doesn't have to be 7nm. It just needs to be the right cost and have the right TDP to make sense in a PS4 portable. I think a lot of this conversation we're having is completely unnecessary because I wasn't arguing against the points that you were making, I was arguing against the points our friend Kev was making. He's the one that believes it's necessary for Sony to use an APU made using a 7nm fabrication process in order to get the TDP necessary for a PS4 portable. He's the one that thinks it would automatically be cheaper to fabricate chips using a 7nm fabrication process. He's the one that thinks Sony can produce a PS4 portable using this 7nm APU for $399 or less as soon as six months from now, and be able to play future PS5 games at a lower resolution/frame rate. I'm pointing out the holes in his nonsense, and you've more or less stepped in and argued on his behalf for some strange reason.

Okay then I'll rephrase:

They're dialed back closer to 7th Gen than 8th Gen.

And what kind of capacity would you like to have it demonstrated?
I can get some underclocking/undervolting graphs if that is your cup of tea.

And I most certainly believe it to be possible as that is my educated point of view. But I am more than happy to meet the requirement of evidence, I typically don't make a claim unless I am certain I can back it up. ;)

Irrelevant? No. Considering it was one of the very founding principles of the entire Core architecture that Intel tends to iterate on a yearly basis... And which dominates the high performance computing spaces.
Rambling on about Chromosomes and so on is what is truly irrelevant.

Replicate? That is also not required.
The only requirement is that they have a sufficient baseline of performance whilst being completely ISA compatible.
The rest falls onto the software stack.

There is a reason why the PC has been able to retain backwards compatible for decades, that's not just an assertion either.

If it can fit into my $100 AUD Gamepad/Tablet. Yes.

It's hard for me or anyone to quantify any legitimate numbers as that kind of information isn't typically released into the public domain.
With that in mind... I would say that 14nm would be more cost effective in the short term for a mid-sized SoC, but 7nm most certainly has the long term pricing locked up.

Right now though, 12nm-10nm seems to have good enough power characteristics (As demonstrated by what Ryzen offers) to make a PS4 portable entirely feasible... With the correct binning of course.

The chips need to be designed first. Then they need to go through multiple steppings/spins.
Then the layouts need to be optimized...

Even leveraging AMD's already established library's, it's still not going to happen within 6 months.

I will argue points I fundamentally disagree with, if it actually interests me.