Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[DeadlyNinja]

I dont think flash storage will have the same costs like HDD's at all. Look at how the prices for Flash memory sticks have gone, upon launch you could get 32mb for £50 and now you can buy a 2GB mem stick for £10. Prices are gonna keep going down as production methods get better (the biggest cost reduction will be being able to store the information denser , requiring less materials for the same amount of storage.)

I agree. It's just a matter of when imo. Sure, if someone was to make a console right now, using SSD is out of the question, but what about 3 years or so down the line? We can't really predict how low or high the prices will be, but there's a pretty good chance SSDs will become competitively priced in the future.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I dont think flash storage will have the same costs like HDD's at all.

Not that high. What I meant was there'll be a far higher minimum price in the fixed costs. Yes, you can get a high capacity flash card for ten bucks. But will the minimum price for storage ever drop below a relatively high pricepoint? Looking at your examples, now that a 2 GB card is £10, can you get a 32MB card for 50p? No. So when discs will be costing a couple of bucks to manufacture, flash storage will be costing (much?) more and never able to drop in price. That's where the HDD analogy comes in - You can get far more storage for £30 now than you could 5 years ago, but you can't spend less than £30 to any storage at all. HDD's can't be made cheaper than a certain minimum due to fixed costs.

This all said, I've no idea what's limiting flash prices or how that's going to change, and if the cost differential between printing a disc and printing a game on flash will be significant or not. DS games certainly aren't costing the earth, and Nintendo + publishers seem to be making enough money off them

 

[PeterT]

I find this discussion intriguing, so I looked up some current minimum prices for solid state storage. I (as a normal customer) can buy a 1 GB SD card right now for 3€ (that includes 20% tax), so it should be even cheaper in volume. Now, even if we assume this base cost won't decrease at all a doubling of storage capacity per year at that price point is the least that can be expected IMO. So that would be 32 GB in 5 years.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Not that high. What I meant was there'll be a far higher minimum price in the fixed costs.

Not at all, the fixed costs are relatively low, not anymore than implementing die shrinks from now on.

If SSD's reach price parity with HDD's (Storage\Price) within the next 5 years. (Like both Samsung and Seagate predict) I dont think any optical media can compete. Its has better performance than any optical drive can have, they are solid, and can withstand quite a bit of damage so its mobile aswell. It will have more than enough space, and it will be cheap enough. SSD's storage is nice because as we get denser and denser storage, is that we get more disc place per square inch, and cheaper and cheaper discs.

HDD's can't be made cheaper than a certain minimum due to fixed costs.

I dont think you get this at all. HDD's cannot be made cheaper than a certain minimum due to a certain high VARIABLE cost. The material used to make HDD parts simply cannot be made cheaper.

SDD's are the exact opposite. Like DVD\Blurays its only driven by FIXED costs. The material cost for making SDD's are relatively low, what costs is the research + cost of making new production plants + cost of die shrinks. Thus as long as it gets produced enough, it gets cheap enough.

 

[MfA]

How does the typical write speed of a SSD compare to the 5400RPM HDD in consoles? Advantage?

Cheap dual chip flash storage manages 10 MB/s at the moment ... so no advantage there. The "real" SSDs do better, but they aren't doing it with a few large cheap MLC flash chips. Of course for the price they dare charge for console HDs they could afford a pretty good SSD.

PS. HDs at price parity with SSDs in 5 years? With what technology exactly? Moore's law would not even get you parity with todays HDs and they can still up the density. Consumer prices for flash storage bottoms out at around 3 euro per GB at the moment, HDs are closer to 0.1 euro.

PPS. making PROMs is easy, if there is a significant market for them they will always be cheaper than flash.

 

[eastmen]

I'm going to jump into this thread .

The main problem with SSD right now is price. SD cards would be ideal but they are to slow.


What i'm thinking is if ms (cause sony is sunk in deep with bluray) can come up with a fast flash drive things should be good .

Right now a 16 gig sd card is about $40 . 2 years from now i'm sure they will be at $10 or less . 32 gig sd cards will be cheap also. That shoudl be good capacity wise.

Speed is still the problem. Class 6 cards are what 6MB/s ? however standard cards are up to 22MB/s thats um between 4 and 6x bluray speeds however it will be consistant through the card unlike a bluray disc. however they are limited to 4 gigs .

So I wonder if they can go to that speed at 32gigs in the next 2 years for the next gen of consoles .


my real question is , whats the possiblity of of them including two sd slots and spreading a game across two sd cards . That would give double the trasnfer rate of whatever they come up with. If they can get standard sd speed that would be 44MB/s without any drops in speed. That would be between 6and 12x (54MB/s) and it wont make any noise .



So Its possible , i think sd cards with a speed increase would be better than ssd . You wouldn';t have to skip the middle man if you didn't want to. Actually I'm sure gamestop and bestbuy would like this better as the cases could be smaller like the psp cases if they wnated them too be. Also a console could be smaller too as you wouldn't need the large 5 1/2 disc drives in them. That space can be recouped for better cooling or just make the console smaller

 

[MfA]

Right now a 16 gig sd card is about $40.

Off by 50%, did you mean euros?

2 years from now i'm sure they will be at $10 or less.

The margins have already dropped into oblivion, for a 4x decrease you would need major architectural improvements on top the process shrinks (which will only account for 2x tops, probably less).

Unless someone finally commercializes a roll to roll manufacturing process for solid state storage I don't quite see how it is ever going to get really cheap.

I doubt even Nintendo would lose a couple of bucks on their margins just for a smaller medium. As for the other consoles, most of their titles won't fit on flash at a reasonable cost. Not now, not next generation either.

Flash makes sense for internal drives for the next generation consoles, but not as a distribution media (except for the mobiles).

 

[eastmen]

Off by 50%, did you mean euros?

huh

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211300

$47 bucks . off by $7 bucks ,

I actually got the parriot one for $40 bucks a few weeks ago with a mail in rebate

The margins have already dropped into oblivion, for a 4x decrease you would need major architectural improvements on top the process shrinks (which will only account for 2x tops, probably less).

Unless someone finally commercializes a roll to roll manufacturing process for solid state storage I don't quite see how it is ever going to get really cheap.

I doubt even Nintendo would lose a couple of bucks on their margins just for a smaller medium. As for the other consoles, most of their titles won't fit on flash at a reasonable cost. Not now, not next generation either.

Flash makes sense for internal drives for the next generation consoles, but not as a distribution media (except for the mobiles).

We really don't know how much that 16 gig sd costs to make . What if it was 5 bucks . What if its less ? in 2 years the price will be less regardless of what it is now and process shrinks , yields should get better and tweaks to the process should allow them to fit more on the silicon . Just simply larger capacitys for the same costs . 32 gig sd cards are already avalible . The price is high cause they are new and people will buy them but price will come down .

You don't need to eat into your margin. Lets say that in 2010 32 gig sd cards cost $5 bucks for publishers to buy and put data on. Simply increase the cost of the game to $65 bucks in the states. The xbox 360 shows that even a $10 increase in software price wont affect sales .



Also instead of using multiple flash drives , ms can come up with its own packaging that simply fits multpile chips into the package , perhaps the size of a flash drive. That way you can get your 4 sd chips or 8 sd chips and increase the transfer speeds.

 

[MfA]

We really don't know how much that 16 gig sd costs to make

We know how much profit the flash manufacturers are making ... it costs pretty close to what they are charging.

 

[-tkf-]

You don't need to eat into your margin. Lets say that in 2010 32 gig sd cards cost $5 bucks for publishers to buy and put data on. Simply increase the cost of the game to $65 bucks in the states. The xbox 360 shows that even a $10 increase in software price wont affect sales .

Also instead of using multiple flash drives , ms can come up with its own packaging that simply fits multpile chips into the package , perhaps the size of a flash drive. That way you can get your 4 sd chips or 8 sd chips and increase the transfer speeds.

If you earn 4 dollars less than you would with a Blu-Ray media you essentially losing 4 dollars pr sold game.

The point is that if an SD Card costs 5 dollars it would still have to be cheaper than any given competition on the market. By 2010 it´s very possible that everything will be based on Blu-Ray.

 

[eastmen]

We know how much profit the flash manufacturers are making ... it costs pretty close to what they are charging.

and you know this how . Links to information ?


fry's had a $35 after mail in a few weeks ago


http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14158986#post14158986

Don't know which brand it is. Using the cheapeast on newegg though your still looking at a $13 price drop. So were they selling it at close to cost then or close to cost after the rebate.

the fact of the matter is that flash memory is cheap and dropping all the time and is replaced with higher capacity flash .


a data 4 gig

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211067

Here is an a-data 8 gig for $25

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211180

a data 16 gig $48

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211300


In sept of 2006

http://www.photographyblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/kingston_4gb_sdhc_card/

Kingston released its 4gb sdhc card for $199 .

now its $18 bucks

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134474



So in 2 years what will the 16 gig cards cost , what will the newly released 32 gig cards cost ?

A heck of a lot less for companys than for us

 

[eastmen]

If you earn 4 dollars less than you would with a Blu-Ray media you essentially losing 4 dollars pr sold game.

The point is that if an SD Card costs 5 dollars it would still have to be cheaper than any given competition on the market. By 2010 it´s very possible that everything will be based on Blu-Ray.

and if you need more space than the limited bluray option ?

What then ?

By 2010 it can be very possible that nothing is based on blur-ray and everyone would have movied on

 

[obonicus]

I have a question: when we speak of SSD, why are we focusing on flash? Is flash cheaper to make than PROMs? MfA suggested in an earlier post that no, that's not true.

And we speak of Nintendo and their costs, but aren't the DS game cards mostly ROM memory, with flash for saves?

 

[MfA]

So in 2 years what will the 16 gig cards cost , what will the newly released 32 gig cards cost ?

Ignoring the fact that their margins have evaporated (just google around for "nand flash margins") you are almost certainly also comparing SLC vs. MLC here. 4x is about the maximum I see their costs dropping, 2x from process, the rest from an extra bit per cell and from trimming fat.

Flash isn't cheaper to produce than ROM ... but you do need to make a specific deal with a foundry (which will expect higher margins for it) and you need to produce the masks. Even Nintendo might not have the volumes necessary to keep making ROMs attractive.

 

[Graham]

Hello.
(Yes, I'm still alive... complicated)

I say this while holding a new 8gb SD card I just purchased. It's a decent one, so cost a bit.
Prices here get down to NZ $4.50/gb, which is $3 us.

I actually think solid state storage would make sense from a comsumer perspective for the next round of consoles.

I'm sure there is a higher production cost. Cutting edge consoles historically are money losers for their first year(s), usually on the hardware of course. It's another cost to factor in...

There are also cost savings involved. The hardware gets a damn sight simpler - fewer moving parts, fewer parts period. It would also help the physical design (eg heat management).
Not just that but transport - getting the games/consoles to a store is cheaper if they are smaller and lighter.

hypothetical:
If having a flash reader in the console saved $20 on the console hardware+transport (due to space saving, packaging, etc) but added $7* to each disk production *and* saved $3 in transport per disk - then with an expected game/console ratio of 4/1 it's a money saver of $4 per console.
I'm not saying that is what would happen (I don't know enough about how the costs break down), but I bet it's a lot more complex than just saying X costs more.

The other side is read speed. Yes, on paper a 10mb/sec optical drive beats 8mb/sec flash storage - but that is assuming it's all sequential. Seeks kill optical drives, and are one of the harder parts of console development.
Realistically how fast will bluray be in the next couple of years for a console? 4x, 8x? How would that compare to a flash storage system?.. I don't know, but I imagine it's probably close enough to be workable either way.

*lifetime average?

On a completely unrealated note, my 2.5 year old 360 bit the dust yesterday. If only that GPU heat sink were bigger...

 

[Mintmaster]

There won't be any game saving in transport because you still need product packaging. If it was possible to save costs by shipping only discs while maintaining retail sales then it would have been done ages ago.

I don't doubt that flash would be faster, but I don't know if this is much of a limit for game design. Flash in place of the HDD makes more sense.

For portable consoles, though, there's clearly an advantage with flash due to size. PSP is probably the only mainstream optical-based console we'll ever see.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There won't be any game saving in transport because you still need product packaging. If it was possible to save costs by shipping only discs while maintaining retail sales then it would have been done ages ago.

Smaller packaging leads to savings though. DS boxes are a fraction of the size of a DVD case, so you could fit 3-4x as many in a container for shipping and save a noteworthy amount.

I doubt any of us are in a position to argue the specifics, as there are so many variables involved. I think Graham's post was more about identifying that savings can be found in the whole production > retail > sale chain, which may be enough to offset increased media prices.

 

[Dregun]

Speed..

How much is the cost of a 16gb stick the ROM istelf and how much of it is the packaging and container? I mention this because I am surprised nobody has mentioned Addonics Quad CF PCI Controller. Why couldn't the console manufactures use this form of technology to put ROMS in a RAID 0 format dramatically increasing the speed and possibly reducing costs.

Looking at current pricing through pricewatch I've noticed that a 2gb stick vs a 4gb stick is roughly 1/2 the price on almost all forms of memory. But when you go from 16gb to 32gb the cost is almost a third (almost $100). If we were to go with with a solution today for a computer you could buy a Kingston 4gb 133x (19.48mbs) for 23.99 and the Addonics CF card for 49.99.

4 CF cards = 119.96
1 CF reader = 49.99

Total cost is 169.95 for
16gb x 77.9 mbs

This of course does not look very pleassing today, either for a storage or speed medium compared to cost. But whats stopping them from using larger Roms and more of them?

If trends continue the pricing for a 16gb or 32gb chip should be fairly innexpensive. For MS, Sony or Nintendo to develop a SSD with a built in raid controller holding 8, 16 or 32 Flash roms we could potentially have a SSD inside the consoles that offers enough storage but blazing speed. Heck it might be worth it for the next set of consoles to use a 300-400gb internal SSD for game play and allow the consumer to plug in portable innexpesive hard drives for music and movie storage.

The only form of distribution I see flash roms being used for would be for a form of managed copy. This would allow people to possibly store the DLC on another medium for backup purposes, possibly even allowing another form of distrabution amoungst the consumers that is not driven by the consoles themselves.

For instance you create a backup of RockBand 4 that you just purchased retail full disk and all. You give it to your friend and once his machine recognizes the game it offers to install it to his system for a reduced cost. He chooses to install the game to his system and it saved him $10, he didn't even need the internet because he had the option of getting an unlock code over the phone at the same time he made his purchase. The consumer did all the leg work, no bandwith was used and it allowed someone without access to the internet (or at least a fast enough connection) to get the game at a reduced cost.

 

[MfA]

SSDs are internally already running lots of chips in parallel, the problem for budget applications is that you really can't afford to use that many chips and the standard interfaces on flash are still pretty slow. I'm sure those will improve though.

50GB at 3/4$ per GB is much more than 7$ ... Nintendo might be able to ship games on flash, but high budget games on the other consoles would have to start cutting back on content to be able to fit their games on flash for the next generation. Not going to happen. 7$ will buy you in the range of 10 GB in 2 years barring unforeseen technological innovations.

 

[eastmen]

I think compact flash is lmisted to 8 gigs . Just like regular sd cards are limited to 4 gigs and when you go to sdhc you get more capacity but a third of the speed .


I think whats more interesting is that for your example , you buy rockband it comes with a 100 songs on the flash card but then the flash card has 8 gigs of free space that you can download songs to. That would reduce the need for such a huge hardrive in the next generation . All games could come with room for dlc on the flash card.

mabye ms can get away with a 120 gig hardrive next gen because only xbox live arcade and video store would download to it and the rest would go on your game cards .