This is mixing up a lot of different issues.
One is that projecting costs that far ahead in time does have a margin of error.
Another is that, while we don't know what AMD is charging for the SOC, the nature of these agreements is that there is a price schedule that cuts what Microsoft pays for it over time.
The projections could have an average or sustained cost value, not the initial cost.
Any teardowns would only have an instantaneous measure of cost, even if their estimates are accurate.
It may not reach $50, but it won't be as big a miss as it appeared right at launch.
I would like to agree but I can't Yukon was not the XB1, the GPU saw a 250% increase in CU count.
They had an option for eSRAM but were aiming primarily at eDRAM. It seems that they had reasonable hope for 22nm process to be available.
Microsoft was fine with no cores disabled, and clocked higher. Why do this?
It's not clear that you can disable just one without issue. The salvage SKUs for Jaguar are dual-core.
Clocks and disabled units would have been adjustable right up to the very end, and could even be changed right now if they felt like it.
This would have been decided after physical evaluation and statistical analysis of actual manufactured product.
Why has Microsoft's real-world experience been trumped by a design that pessimizes the CPU yield and salvage, while cutting the GPU's salvageability in half?
Improve yields, if indeed test wafer comes down great they may reevaluate.
I cut the redundancy on the GPU because the chip was significantly tinier and should have better yields.
But that is nit-picking, the idea was clearly to get the cost as low as possible. I mean whereas Yukon saw a huge boost in performance, cost got really high. In the mean time the strategy to extend their reach through tv integration, kinect, etc. did not change. It is quite different to ship @299$ and 499$ especially when your selling point is aimed toward the masses not your core market. We saw how that turned. Kinect is in a close to EOL state.
I will go back to what I think was wrong with the original Yukon later.
Possibly putting the cart before the horse.
This is quite likely drawn from IP everyone helped contribute to in some form, either in tech or money that funded the R&D. This is asking Microsoft to include a final proprietary product that didn't exist when they set down their own design, and one they may have helped bring into being through the act of designing the system they did.
Why reinvent the wheel? I did not include True Audio here to do kinect audio processing but because it part of recent AMF GPU like Bonaire, it brings nice benefits and might not take much silicon looking at Bonaire die size. I think it offers great bang for bucks.
Now for MSFT to develop its own solution , etc I'm iffy. MSFT is a software company foremost, that type of R&D investment looks misplaced to me. As I state I would have prefer a software solution running on SoC integrated to Kinect, making Kinect more autonomous and not depending on the processing power of the device it stream data. I would have enable apps both on the One and devices like tablets. Obviously cost more but ARM SoC goes down, their processing power increased, etc.
If they could not make it run on a cheap multi core arm SoC and that it requires specific silicon, that doesn't benefit from dynamic of existing market, needs to be improved or shrinked by MSFT (moar r&D) Well I'm close to think that it should not be commercialized altogether. MSFT is not Apple they don't do their own SoC in which the tech and related investment could be deployed and amortized.
What exactly is your time window for when an analysis of the situation would say things are "wrong"?
Are you viewing this solely from a console hardware perspective, or also including the large number of parallel initiatives that made up the platform?
It is not only hardware for me, they planned a significantly less potent system, selling @299$ in 2013, they did not touch the business plan in the slightest but shipped @499$.
That is what bothers me the most with the project as a whole. Yukon was coherent, with BC, low price, etc. Ultimately my opinion is that 2013 would have been too late to ship such a system.
The reason why they revamp it are not that important, what is important is that they jumped from 299$ 499$, price got completely disregarded. Yet at the time those slides were made (2010?) they were clever enough to guess the PS4 price right.
They should not have lost sight of the price as a determining factors. 499$ is freaking too expensive, shrink no longer happen that often it will be a long long while till they can offer the public the services they once envisioned to deliver @299$, one shrink might not be enough though they may agree to lose money.
Any effort with this level of complexity is going to have to pull the trigger ahead of time.
The SOC's design and manufacturing time frame was down to the wire at 2-3 years.
That is why I stated that the decision to go with 28nm process, give up on BC, and increase the system perf may have happen fall 2010 - early 2011 /not longer after those slides were created.
The broadness of Microsoft's initiatives would have added inflexibility to the process. The interdependencies, complexity, and an implementation that experienced knock-on effects throughout the platform if elements were removed or changed are a source of overhead.
Indeed, too heavy, may be not a strong enough lead.
Accounting /provisioning (not sure of the wording) is done for the R&D of this or that, there is not turning back, one can say but market changed, our strategy changed, etc. it is useless and he will get bad reviews. That is simplified view.
Yet they have that plan (Yukon) around 2010, a massive part of it was discarded and it really looks like they did not reevaluated it, properly at least, worth price which was critical was disregarded.
Sorry I can't help but think what steve Jobs reaction would be if anything Apple that was to ship @ 299$ for which price was critical but needed increase specs came back costing 499%, 66% more, with double the RAM than previously accounted for and 1 GB left unused /reserved for future use, some icing on the cake lets call it future proofing, quite possible an OS that eats twice the resources and that is just to speak about RAM. I think anti gravity may have happened and I expect a couple of things to fly out of the office or windows. <= that is joke but there is some truth to it.
If anything even the system I depicted could have been too expensive (let SHAPE inside if you want), it would have been match Durango, be more flexible, ultimately MSFT would still have 900P machine and Sony a 1080P to make it simple. May be MSFT need a 720P machine, gross characterization of system overall perfs but I hope you get what I mean and a commandable advantage in price (I speak about the system alone here), both to make up for kinect cost but also in the long run reach a price attractive to the masses significantly sooner.
Everything at this level involves a committee and organizational review. Unless you're a billionaire running your own vanity project, a multibillion dollar initiative with synergies across whole industries is going to have a lot of stakeholders.
I acknowledged that that was a poorly worded attempt at summing up my previous post.
