A Zen3 cpu would have been a nice thing on its own i think, instead of the old zen2. Perhaps we would have seen much higher clocks enabling higher FPS/refresh rates since things seem heading that way, even in the mobile market.
I'm not sure we'll be seeing radically higher clocks on Zen 3, as it's probably on the same process as XSX and PS5. The unified L3 would probably have been a nice bonus though, along with some other IPC gains.
I was thinking of bulk-pricing for GPU and CPU parts. Bringing the systems around $600-700$ in BOM pricing.
Well compared to the 3070, for consoles you'd be looking at another 8 GB of GDDR6 (probably getting uncomfortably close to another $100 at the mo), a small and efficient (and therefore expensive) PSU, a 1TB SSD, a separate CPU and a way of connecting two packages on the board, perhaps requiring two heatsinks or one more complex heatsink, design customisations to include hardware decompression for both the CPU and GPU along with highly custom sound hardware, an UHD BR drive, and also the case, controller, etc etc.
But you'd still have added latency for either CPU and GPU when accessing memory, and added overhead when sharing data between them.
Unless Nvidia were prepared to take a big hit on their custom 3070 for the long term contract, I think $600-700$ in BOM for a 3070 equipped console would involve significant losses with reduced opportunities for cost reduction in the long term.
Kind of a pity, because Nvidia's tech would be just as cool competing in the console arena.
No one said that. I sure didn't. And Sony's PS5 bulky design (shape) is their own fault in many ways. They shot for high-clocks rather than a wider/slower GPU setup.
I guess that either that was cheaper, or that they had to go narrow (and therefore faster) for BC. Or maybe it was some of both...?
