Die shrinks are becoming increasingly expensive, and it may not make sense to go below 65 nm. Or 45 nm. There will be some point below which only Intel CPUs, flash memory and DRAM go.
You are right, die shrinks are becoming really expensive, but we know that Sony already has Cell working on 45 nm and the RSX on 45 nm is well under way. Maybe the collaboration with IBM and Toshiba is starting to payoff, since they probably can share some of the costs, the standard CMOS process of the RSX is probably of help as well. I don´t think it´s to far fetched to expect at least one more shrink within four years from, on the contrary I think it is very likely to happen.
It would be interesting to know Microsofts plan for coming die shrinks.
You sure about that? Everywhere I've read they say the switched away from the "order chips from GPU/CPU vendor" model towards the "pay for development, produce themselves" model exactly because of the license fees they had to pay Intel and NVIDIA for the first Xbox.
I am sure there is a licensing fee/unit involved, it´s the standard way to deal with IC-IP, I think it´s been mentioned here on b3d, the big gain is that Microsoft have control of manufacturing and can benefit from die shrinks and competetive foundries.
Solid-state discs which have HDD-like transfer rates retail around $50/GB today,
Not really, more like $15/GB see
Dell
so they'll have to drop down in price 200x times to reach your prices of $5, all in 3-4 years, which I find highly unrealistic. Consumer flash cards retail around $10/GB, which means 40x in 3-4 years - but these cards have nothing like the transfer rates needed to replace the current PS3 HDD. Even we generously assume that the $10/GB is marked up 4x between raw flash chips cost and retail price (which I find improbable, since flash cards are a very competititve, price-sensitive, mass-market product), you still need 10x improvement. Nothing in the past few years of flash development, nothing in the prospects for process shrinks tells us we can expect such a rapid slide of flash memory prices.
Of course Sony wouldn´t be so stupid that they would buy a COTS solid state hard drive, they would just put hte flash right on the motherboard so the only thing you need to care about is the flash price, which is about: $3/GB right now (
link)
The price don´t even have to be cut by half each year for 20 GB to reach the $5 range within 4 years. Analysts are actually expecting the price to drop faster than that.
"Meanwhile, the world is swimming in NAND flash, leading to drastic price declines. NAND prices are set to drop 57 percent this year and 52 percent next year, said Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner."
link
An out-of-the-blue storage technology won't be able to recoup its R&D and become even cheaper in time for this generation.
Flash is not really an "out-of-the-blue storage technology", so I don´t really see what you are getting at.
