specwarGP2
Regular
Sole win but the only one that matters because someone has to pay for the replication.
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Sole win but the only one that matters because someone has to pay for the replication.
Okay. I guess that closes the subject.
Drama! I would love drama.
I am not.Except you just keep ignoring the market advantages of physical media (stock clearances, secondary markets, etc) that DD eliminates and are grossly underselling the cost and replication advantages of BD (or any other future physical format).
No decision is made in a vacuum or solely on technical merits, in fact technical merits often take a back seat to economic factors (RIP SED displays). You're bang on that we've been going in circles, there just hasn't been much to change the cost factors in physical media or to radically expand broadband infrastructure in the last 5 years or so.
I pointed to steam and origin and their sales along with origin giving free games. Sony and MS also both have free games for dd and often have sales that rival retail.
What cost and replication advantages does BD have over DD ? Steam has games still avalible from the day the service launched and is able to profit and games as low as $1 which people continue to download years after they were sold. BD still needs the discs pressed , boxed , art , shipped and to sit on shelves and when it sells poorly sometimes discs have to be bought back.
We have two platforms , one of which is very successful that use flash for their games. Both platforms sell their games for less than the optical systems. A 3ds game as a new release will cost from $25-$40 and I believe vita games are $30-$40. Some how they are able to profit on them.
But you are because you keep comparing the apples of monopoly eco systems (consoles) that have displayed none of the characteristics of the orange of the open market PC. There is no practical comparison for cost of production to BD today as I'm unaware of any 25GB or 50GB Vita or 3DS titles. I love that you just came back with one of the largest economic pressures on game cost (physical stock) as a reason for the consumer to want to abandon a model that delivers savings to them
Yeah, that's the main problem with flash, the vita games average 1.5GB, with 4GB max, and physical size is a core requirement for portable gaming devices so it's worth the expense. They use flash because they have no other alternative. With the PS360 generation, games were 10GB (with some exceptions maxing out the bluray). With the PS4, games are already around 40GB and I wouldn't be surprised if we see multi-disc releases at some point. Next gen will probably need much more because it will be 4K.
If next gen comes out late, say in 2020, something like 200GB of flash would be way too expensive, depending if we believe market analysts predictions on nand price. If they gimp the max capacity to 50GB it could be possible. Even then, there are still major hurdles for mass replication of flash data, and it is still much more expensive than the 500GB discs on the bluray technology roadmap. (Archival discs)
Since this is a cyclic thread, I can save time by countering the upcoming mention of 3d nand.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/3d-nand-cost-investment/
3D NAND will lead to bigger solid state drives, but it may not shave costs
If next gen comes out late, say in 2020, something like 200GB of flash would be way too expensive, depending if we believe market analysts predictions on nand price. If they gimp the max capacity to 50GB it could be possible. Even then, there are still major hurdles for mass replication of flash data, and it is still much more expensive than the 500GB discs on the bluray technology roadmap. (Archival discs)
Since this is a cyclic thread, I can save time by countering the upcoming mention of 3d nand.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/3d-nand-cost-investment/
3D NAND will lead to bigger solid state drives, but it may not shave costs
didn't it also only support wifi a/b and thus was slow as hell for most people downloading games.
For a vita game cart you wouldn't need to worry about write endurance so even 3bit nand would be fine.
Your article is interesting but we have 3d Nand now in ssd's and have had for the better part of a year and prices have continued on their downward march.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9490/toshiba-and-sandisk-announce-48layer-256gbit-tlc-3d-nand
everyone is switching and if they can fit multiple times the amount of data on a single chip then flash will continue to become an increasingly better form of media storage.
The vita and 3ds were both able to profit on flash carts while selling at lower prices than console games. These systems are what 4 or 5 years old now. A new digital only handheld using DD would have access to 128 to 256 Gb die's today. Samsung wants to start producing a 384Gb TLC die this quarter.
Its a lot different than it was when those platforms launched. We are heading into the console storage space with single die flash at 32 to 48GB per die.
It really is a cyclic thread, now we can start again with wild ass NAND price predictions... and I am countering them in advance with more recent articles from june 2015...
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...e-rise-of-ssds-over-hard-drives-debunked.html
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...e-rise-of-ssds-over-hard-drives-debunked.html
your link leads to this link
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-free-fall/a/d-id/1320958
which states the complete opposite of what your link says.
The article he is arguing against states that SSDs will surpass mechanical drives in storage capacity at the end of this year or 2016 and may hit up to 30TB in 2018 .
He also states that as more 3D nand enters the market in 2015 prices will go down further from about $300 for 1TB
So a 2019 all DD console could go with a 10TB ssd if the price is right , who knows ! (I doubt a 10TB ssd would be cheap enough by then.)
I'd still wager removing the hardrive and optical drive and going with flash and a usb based hardrive would be the smartest choice for a console maker.
Flash would allow you to download content directly to the flash device and you could sell an optional hardrive be it mechanical or ssd for other uses.
Flash should allow for 80MB/s transfer rates or faster depending on what your looking for. That would blow optical out of the water.
I'll take the dude from Gartner over a dude who spent his life on DoD contracts where cost isn't even in the top ten of concerns. We're starting to conflate 'SSDs are getting bigger' with 'SSDs are getting cost comparable to mechanical' and these are very different things.
SSD costs are (roughly) linear with size, mechanical drives has a fixed lower cost (motors, actuators etc).
Lower (<250GB) capacity SSDs are now less than a factor of two $/GB compared to lower capacity HDDs. In a year or two 250GB SSDs will be cheaper than mechanical counterparts.
IMO, next gen will launch with a modest amount of internal storage and then allow for storage expansions. Storage is a large fixed BOM entry impairing price competitiveness.
Much better to allow the consumer to expand it as they see fit.
Cheers
SSDs rely on parallel reads and writes for both wear levelling and performance so we will not see a 1 chip NAND SSD in <5 years. Even if cost per GB plummets you will still need multiple chips negating much of the savings. It's why the cost per GB is often higher on low capacity drives versus higher capacity units.
Consumers hate expandability and the continued dominance of Apple proves this. Consumer products are fixed in function, I'd love to see the percentages on what proportion of PS4 users replaced their drives and how many XB1owners use external hdds.
I don't disagree with your argument, but your evidence isn't valid. Apple consumer may well lament the lack of expandability, but put up with it because the benefits of the system outweigh this negative. I've certainly never heard anyone complain about expandability being an option, and so it's absolutely not the case that consumers hate it (and ergo want to avoid it and will choose a product without rather than with).
So how many NAND chips is in the iPhone 6s 16GB ? Does it have adequate performance (compared to mechanical drives)? How much do you expect density to increase in five years ?
I could easily imagine two skus: one with 256GB NAND and one with 256GB NAND and 1/2 TB HDD; Using part of the NAND as a cache in the latter case.
MS had a ton of success with the 360 arcade SKU because it significantly lowered price of entry.
Apple products don't have expandability because they segment their products by storage capacity (otherwise sales of their 64 and 128GB models would be zero)
Cheers
Predictions need to be supported, or you end up with something like this from 2008:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/blu-ray-is-dead-heckuva-job-sony/
We need 4 predictions here:
1. How big will the games be next gen (I'm saying the big titles would need 200GB)
2. When will it launch (I'm saying 2020)
3. What will be the cost per GB for NAND then (I'm saying 0.11 per GB)
4. what fixed cost the whole media will need (I'm saying $1 for a custom security chip, PCB, packaging)
So, media blank cost excluding replication infrastructure:
128GB carts : $15.08
256GB carts : $29.16
@eastmen, please tell us your prediction for the 4 points above. You already said you expect next gen in 2017, is it still the case? What is your prediction for NAND cost per GB in 2017?
Ref:
Predict: Next gen console tech (9th generation edition)
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One of the standout problems with the assumed density improvement trends is where they're bumping into degradation in retention and signal processing due to the shrinking cells, more bits per cell, resistance of 3D NAND stacks, and/or a combination of those factors.
The latest cheap TLC PC drives that represent the leading edge of the cost-improvement curve with the finest process or 3D manufacturing are presenting some pretty poor write performance, and then there is Samsung's range of age-related performance degradation without some kind of flash scrubbing or refresh.
There was some controversy over the unpowered retention time of flash, which in the standard's worst-case (limit of write endurance, warmer storage) was dropping to a limit that warehoused stock might start to notice failures. That shouldn't be the same problem for a fresh cart, but that assumes no further corners are cut and that such problems do not get worse. The quality of the the lower tiers of flash like thumb drives or cheap players is a step down in terms of reliability.
Reduced performance can, even if this is only treated as a download medium by a console, impact the manufacturing side by requiring reduced throughput or more capital expenditures for more equipment to maintain the same throughput. Higher redundancy that affects realized capacity, or stronger error-checking and DSPs in the cart or the console could add to the BOM or hurt storage.
The poorer retention and likelihood of corner-cutting with NAND may lead to a higher failure rate on a medium that is less disposable and less resilient than when these predictions were first made.
It's also not clear that memory silicon has been able to exhaust the list of higher-paying markets before reaching the point of having no better use than competing with polycarbonate. Thus far, the manufacturers have found the pricing flexibility or other markets above replacing highly disposable plastic circles.
The latest cheap TLC PC drives that represent the leading edge of the cost-improvement curve with the finest process or 3D manufacturing are presenting some pretty poor write performance, and then there is Samsung's range of age-related performance degradation without some kind of flash scrubbing or refresh.
There was some controversy over the unpowered retention time of flash, which in the standard's worst-case (limit of write endurance, warmer storage) was dropping to a limit that warehoused stock might start to notice failures. That shouldn't be the same problem for a fresh cart, but that assumes no further corners are cut and that such problems do not get worse. The quality of the the lower tiers of flash like thumb drives or cheap players is a step down in terms of reliability.
Reduced performance can, even if this is only treated as a download medium by a console, impact the manufacturing side by requiring reduced throughput or more capital expenditures for more equipment to maintain the same throughput. Higher redundancy that affects realized capacity, or stronger error-checking and DSPs in the cart or the console could add to the BOM or hurt storage.
The poorer retention and likelihood of corner-cutting with NAND may lead to a higher failure rate on a medium that is less disposable and less resilient than when these predictions were first made.
It's also not clear that memory silicon has been able to exhaust the list of higher-paying markets before reaching the point of having no better use than competing with polycarbonate. Thus far, the manufacturers have found the pricing flexibility or other markets above replacing highly disposable plastic circles.
From Flash Summit 2015, they said the 3D NAND is merely "allowing" the cost reduction trend to continue (like 25% price drop per year?).
If they already need 20nm features for what they call 40nm class of 3D NAND, I wonder how many die shrink are left before hitting the same wall of reliability as planar.
If they already need 20nm features for what they call 40nm class of 3D NAND, I wonder how many die shrink are left before hitting the same wall of reliability as planar.
