$3 billion is the estimated value over the life of the console cycle, not the R&D budget.
Microsoft licenses the IP from AMD (so they can take to fab themselves, pay AMD royalty (time descending) and able to maintain cost control) and owns portions of the IP in use (such as DMEs)
How dense...
Thing is... What will be more impressive? A bunch more shading power or a ton of GPGPU power? I say GPGPU because it's going to be what completely changes the game. Art assets are stupid hard to do but GPGPU stuff is easier and can be far more impressive. Far more organic, far more "real"...
If it's anything they are hiding, it's dedicated GPGPU cores (with no texture units) bound directly with the ESRAM... For a 2-3 billion transistor investment, they have done less talking about it compared to EDRAM
I am also constantly bothered by the dev docs referring to the CUs as strictly...
It's both rare and double helix
And there's a lot of talented people working on this, as well as hardcore fighting gamers to ensure its stands up in quality
As well as ken lobb
I have complete faith in this game
It depends on what the actual cost of the one is
If they are making a huge margin on it, they may just try to blow Sony out of the water with content to try to bleed them out