I really see this PS5 as the Wii U + XB1 + PS3 bis arrogant moment of Sony.
I don't think this is anywhere near as catastrophic as those three. In chronological order of cock ups (or COoCU's, if you will
- The PS3 had a fairly naff GPU grafted onto it, which was generally less performant than the X360's. It had substantially less memory due to OS reservations. It cost an arm and a leg to manufacture. As well, its OS was atrocious. So people were faced with a much more expensive, graphically uglier console with a shit UX. I loved it (except for installations of games and patches) but I understand why plenty of people didn't.
- The WiiU was pretty much just an overclocked Wii. Which itself was an overclocked GameCube. It could generally outperform the PS360, but not by much, and it was especially poorly timed as it was just on the cusp of the PS4+XB1. It's controller gimmick was also rubbish, particularly because you were limited to one per system, and was useless on its own. Had each Wuublet been able to play GB/GBA/DS games, as well as connect multiple of them to the base console for multiplayer, I suspect things might have been a bit less Dreamcast-y.
- The XBoxOne was advertised to the world as being the place you could buy your games in order to not own them. The TV, TV, TV thing was a misstep, certainly, but it was nowhere near the magnitude of saying "here, buy this console and keep asking our servers for permission to play games... Which you're also going to have to buy." IMO that's what killed a lot of interest and a lot of trust.
Because of the stupid BC requirements Cerny had to design the PS5 around 36 CUs using a very power innefficient fast and narrow design:
It's hard to say, at this point, how much that was the case. 36CU's seems to have been the minimum in order to ensure PS4Pro compatibility, which is great. I would've preferred more CU's, but as long as the 2.23GHz clockspeed is generally sustained, and the fan noise isn't too great, I'm personally quite happy with 10.3TF's of compute, and it'll be interesting to see how "faster" compares to "more."
Off topic: I'm typing this on my phone, using swipe, and when I went to swipe "faster," the word "gayer" came up instead. This made me smile, and so I'm sharing it with all of you. You heard it here folks "the PS5 is gayer than the XSX." I know I'm buying one.
- 36CUs requirement for BC is like the TV TV TV of XB1 leading to 8GB of DDR3 and reduced number of CUs or the Wii BC hardware requirements leading to a super weak Wii U APU
We don't know if the decision to go with 36CU's was because more would hamper BC, or if they wanted to go as small as possible and 36 was the minimum to ensure PS4Pro compatibility. I suspect the latter.
But your comparison doesn't really hold up because the XBoxOne resulted in a bigger, more expensive chip. As long as Sony get yields under control, they should have a smaller, cheaper chip. How much smaller and cheaper remains to be seen though.
- Because of the very power innefficient design (but still underpowered system because 10tf GPU and low ram bandwidth), it'll still be expensive APU + cooling + PSU leading to high price
The APU will only be expensive if it has poor yields, and the RDNA2 reveal suggests that may not be the case. Maybe it will be initially, but yields improve over time, and this clockspeed won't be a big deal when it transitions to a newer node.
Cooling will be relatively expensive, yes, but if the more elaborate cooling was on the cards anyway (after the banshee that was the PS4Pro) then pushing clocks as high as it could manage would be worth doing anyway.
I'm not sure the PSU needs to be especially expensive. It seems likely to be a ~200w SoC.
- Custom 3D audio (that most players don't care about and most developers won't use) = Shape audio on XB1. But that will definitely increase the BOM.
It'll increase the BoM, but not by much. From what we know, and from what the
@3dilettante has inferred, it seems likely to be a single CU. So not much silicon budget has gone towards it.
Had they sacrificed 4CU's for it, I'd agree that it's bollocks, but it seems relatively inexpensive. I was playing Wolfenstein last night, using headphones, and the positional audio was pretty lacking. I'm quite looking forward to an evolution of this.
It might even be a pretty commonplace feature on multiplatform games: the XSX has enough of a CU advantage to warrant developers spending a couple of them on audio. Depending on the extent of the XSX's audio hardware.
- SSD tech. Again it will only be used on first party games and it won't make the multiplat games look better. This the Cell moment of PS5: exotic tech great for first party (once they will have mastered it), but totally useless on multiplat games. That will increase the BOM the most.
I'm not convinced it will. There's more NAND in the XSX, so the BoM is slightly higher there. The XSX also has hardware for decoding and decrypting data, so there's a comparable BoM there. It's hard to say who's costs more.
Sony's will see the most advantageous use in first party games, certainly, but Microsoft's solution is no slouch either, and both will see plenty of use.
Result: expensive to make PS5, maybe even more expensive than Xbox Series X, but 20% weaker system (for most players).
A smaller chip, with more expensive cooling, and virtually identical everything else isn't going to result in a more expensive PS5. Maybe initially of yields are poor, but not within a year or two of launch.
Bonus: Their BC program is currently treated as a joke (2 different statements with no clarification whatsoever), 100 games available (not even all of them, "almost 100"), and they probably are going to completely drop the program because Jim Ryan, the anti-BC guy, is the boss. Just how they dropped their PS2 classic program on PS4.
This concerns me the most. But there's already enough backlash, and Microsoft are doing such a great job at BC, that Sony are quickly going to realise that they need to spend resources on BC.
The hardware's there already. But the fact that they've only tested the 100 most played PS4 games suggests that they haven't dedicated nearly enough resources to it. If that 100 only refers to some sort of PS5 boost mode, then it's acceptable - at least we'll be able to play PS4 games with PS4/PS4Pro performance. If that 100 is all that's been tested at all, then Jim Ryan hasn't committed enough resources to BC and either needs to course correct or step down, because that folly will cost PlayStation dearly.
TLDR: it's alright
@Globalisateur the console's pretty good. We're going to enjoy it. Except for its shit bandwidth.
