Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

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Wait! I have an idea!
To increase yields, you pick defective PS5 socs, disable enough stuff to play original PS4 games just by sheer back compatibility, downclock / downvolt as much as possible, and sell it as small affordable PS4 Neo along with the new PS5.
We can call it Sony Lock... I think I've already heard that...
 
A PS4Pro carried forward into next gen just seems like a neither/nor device. It is neither as cheap as a PS4 could be nor as performant as the PS5 will be when playing PS4 games. I don't see the point of it.

If Sony releases another current-gen home console in slim factor using 7nm for its SoC, exactly how much more expensive do you think using the Pro specs would be?

The hypothetical Liverpool SoC at 7nm would be ~70mm^2 (perhaps it's even pad limited at this point?), whereas Neo would be ~110mm^2. Both would be small chips.
For RAM, it'd be either 128bit GDDR6 underclocked to 11 GT/s for Liverpool 7nm or 128bit GDDR6 underclocked to 13.6 GT/s 128bit GDDR6. Both would be using the slowest available GDDR6 chips.

How much would Sony save by going Liverpool instead of Neo? $10 per SoC, with pretty much the same costs on everything else?


I see it the other way around.
If Sony is releasing another PS4 to live alongside the PS5 then it would only make sense to make it a PS4 Pro because at least it'd be ready for the great majority of the TVs being sold nowadays, which are 4K.
I think the only way we're seeing Liverpool making a comeback is in a premium portable form factor. 7nm+ SoC using 8x32bit LPDDR5 at the same 5.5GT/s as the 28nm Liverpool's GDDR5 at the time, or some kind of lower power HBM.

With 7nm and GDDR6 at their disposal in a home console, there's very little for Sony to gain in going with Liverpool instead of Neo.
 
I reckon:

  • The base PS4 becomes a discless SKU in two models, a portable and a PSTV-like device. Both capable of 4K output for media and streaming.
  • The PS4Pro gets a slim release with a UHD drive.
  • All of them are Navi and Zen.
  • All PS5 games can be streamed when bought, as long as the user has a PS+ membership.
 
I reckon:

  • The base PS4 becomes a discless SKU in two models, a portable and a PSTV-like device. Both capable of 4K output for media and streaming.
  • The PS4Pro gets a slim release with a UHD drive.
  • All of them are Navi and Zen.
  • All PS5 games can be streamed when bought, as long as the user has a PS+ membership.

I would be very salty if that was the case. Not having UHD forced me to buy a UHD player, which was not even Sony.
 
It depends what the total cost difference is at 7nm between a ps4 and pro. Memory is similar, cpu is similar, all peripherals identical, the only difference is gpu power and die area.

At good yield, the die should be around $0.30 per mm2. How big is an additional 2TF worth of navi compute? Divided by the increased IPC of navi to get equivalent performance?

Supposing that's $10 to $20 worth of silicon and power/heatsink, a pro could be worth it.

If it's more they might be better shrinking the original ps4. And they could make a plain ps4 level of peformance using zen and navi and gddr6.
 
How big is an additional 2TF worth of navi compute? Divided by the increased IPC of navi to get equivalent performance?

I don't think they'll ever risk putting a console with lower compute throughput which is often maximized in consoles through low-level optimizations.
Navi 10 overcomes Vega 10 with lower compute throughput in the PC because the games are all using high-level APIs and they're optimized for a multitude of architectures (and more often optimized towards the competitor than AMD's solutions).
 
Starting to sound like RT Cores is being used as a misnomer for RT hardware. That’s 2 corrections in a short period of time.

I agree, and that means that one of them has to be wrong because it makes for an odd choice of words then.

One doesn't just blurt out "Dedicated RT Cores" Especially if you know you actually don't have them. Lol.

Either Coalition's Colin Penty misspoke, or this Kleegamefan doesn't actually know what type of RT is in whatever platform he's talking about.

Who to believe, the Developer or the Insider?
 
I agree, and that means that one of them has to be wrong because it makes for an odd choice of words then.

One doesn't just blurt out "Dedicated RT Cores" Especially if you know you actually don't have them. Lol.

Either Coalition's Colin Penty misspoke, or this Kleegamefan doesn't actually know what type of RT is in whatever platform he's talking about.

Who to believe, the Developer or the Insider?

Neither of them as PSman1700 said. These aren't the hardware architects of the system.

The majority of developers may have been working with NV RTX cards in their machines up to this point. And as NV's RTX cards are the only commercially available RT cards on the market, it's easy for developers and other people to refer to hardware RT acceleration of any sort to be "RT cores" similar to the RTX cards that they are familiar with.

This doesn't mean that whatever Sony or MS ends up using won't have dedicated RT cores of some sort, only that right now there is no way to know. And anyone other than the hardware architects at Sony or MS stating such and such "off the record" isn't a confirmation of anything at this point.

Hell, I'd even be skeptical of anything that the PR departments at Sony or MS say at this point as we all know that PR oftentimes can get terminology wrong.

Regards,
SB
 
We've already had this discussion when it was MS rumored to have a dual model launch.
But... Where would we go to discuss such baseless rumor with no technical merit?
To be clear, the value of dual-SKUs at launch is a discussion for elsewhere. Those wanting to double-dip their predictions to now add a high-end prediction to their PS5 guesswork are welcome to do so, I guess.
 
If Sony releases another current-gen home console in slim factor using 7nm for its SoC, exactly how much more expensive do you think using the Pro specs would be?

The hypothetical Liverpool SoC at 7nm would be ~70mm^2 (perhaps it's even pad limited at this point?), whereas Neo would be ~110mm^2. Both would be small chips.
For RAM, it'd be either 128bit GDDR6 underclocked to 11 GT/s for Liverpool 7nm or 128bit GDDR6 underclocked to 13.6 GT/s 128bit GDDR6. Both would be using the slowest available GDDR6 chips.

How much would Sony save by going Liverpool instead of Neo? $10 per SoC, with pretty much the same costs on everything else?


I see it the other way around.
If Sony is releasing another PS4 to live alongside the PS5 then it would only make sense to make it a PS4 Pro because at least it'd be ready for the great majority of the TVs being sold nowadays, which are 4K.
I think the only way we're seeing Liverpool making a comeback is in a premium portable form factor. 7nm+ SoC using 8x32bit LPDDR5 at the same 5.5GT/s as the 28nm Liverpool's GDDR5 at the time, or some kind of lower power HBM.

With 7nm and GDDR6 at their disposal in a home console, there's very little for Sony to gain in going with Liverpool instead of Neo.

Everything would be dependent on the projected volume of sales and the cost of designing a 7nm PS4 chip. Going to 16nm didn't lead to a huge reduction in the retail price of the PS4. Officially the PS4 Slim is technically at the same price it was originally priced at during launch in 2016. Sales and discount allow many to purchase at cheaper prices but there is no reason to maintain high retail prices when ultimately you want as many PS4 out in the wild as possible.

It cost 3X the cost of a 16nm to design a 7nm chip. Can Sony honestly project the same level of sales for the 7nm PS4 as it has seen over the last three year plus the next year with the PS4 Slim? There is no guarantee that a 7nm PS4 will sell much cheaper than a 16nm PS4. It might be advantageous for Sony to do an optical shrink with the 11/12 nm flavors of 16nm versus redesigning to accommodate 7nm rules.
 
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So the real next gen console is the ps5-pro... Vanilla ps5 is going to be (as I stated before) much similar in performance to ps4-pro tough with a different design (ryzen....

Also it seems they will be presented during september... (also said)
 
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