Is there a good reason other than possibly price that a PS5 should release 2020 instead of 2019?
If it's going to have full backwards compatibility I don't see why it shouldn't launch at the end of 2019. That way PS4 games should run at native 4k and locked 60fps on it. So it's almost like a Pro + and then by late 2020 they can drop the price and have some big exclusive next gen games come out.
This only works if the hardware will be more or less the same between a late 2019 console and a late 2020 console, I don't see there being much difference other than they will be able to have a slightly faster clock speed if they wait till 2020.
Any ideas on this theory?
hmm a couple thoughts.
To begin with let's just look at Playstation in isolation and forget about MS as a competitor for a second here.
So the 2019 would be when 7nm is sort of ready at its earliest. And the process itself is still going to be relatively new, the expectation here is that its going to be more expensive to produce in 2019 than in 2020 or 2021.
That being said.
The reason why 4Pro could launch at 16nm FF, is because yield was not as big of an issue. You're not selling to the mainstream masses, you're not aiming for 1 million units sold per month globally. So they're safe in that regard. You look over the fence to MS, and even on the same process 16nm FF, they had to wait an additional year to have stable enough process to generate a yield (clock speed) that would enable them to sell Scorpio at a reasonable price point. These are both low selling SKUs.
If they move ahead with selling in 2019, expect a lot of shortages which is not necessarily what Sony wants either. More shortages means longer ramp up period to getting critical mass. Longer time it takes to get to critical mass, the developers aren't aiming to develop for that platform (not enough population). Majority of the focus will still be on last gen.
If you launch 7nm, you'll need to launch smaller dies to get yield, which means that they're significantly weaker than the larger dies. Or you can go with slower clocks, but that just means less performance as well, not sure if they want to lock a whole generation behind mediocrity just to get the jump on a competitor who is largely 1/2 their footprint.
So point (A), you need to be able to sell a lot of units, and you need a mature process with great yields to support it
Memory. Ditto, If you're going to hit GDDR6 or something else, you need to wait until it's mainstream viable and yields are good enough for massive production.
So point (B), memory and lots of it, especially if you need a lot for 4K, and it doesn't get cheaper the newer it is. New memory contracts probably aren't very cheap right now either.
Lastly, thinking about design and intent. All three players in the industry make choices on where they think gaming is headed, and they will optimize their hardware to support it. From a high level point of view, it looks like this
* VR
* 4K/8K (traditional path of certainty)
* Ray Tracing
* Mobile (nintendo)
Those are probably the main buckets. I don't think anyone actually knows what Sony is planning for next gen. Whether they'll go more VR focused, more resolution focused etc. Will there be a PSVR 2? There's a lot of questions here, people didn't like the VR hub, so if VR is their focus, that needs to go directly into the SoC or the board for instance. Additional costs there as well.
So point (C) Sony needs to pick one thing to optimize that will define the consoles purpose for the next upcoming generation.
Then of course it's how MS would respond to Sony if they launched in 2019.
MS will probably start with enabling exclusives on X1X.
When we talk about the 16nm to 7nm, you're gonna gain in transistors and clock speed. Perhaps total output is going to be 8TF ~ 10 TF for instance @ $399. Which is great. But there's nothing stopping X1X from checker boarding/reconstruction. Ideally, checker boarding/reconstruction techniques would be matured by 4Pro, such that it's a technique that everyone would be used to using 2-3 years from now. And multiplatform developers won't checkerboard PS5 just to stretch out the performance difference between X1X and PS5. They don't do that today, and they likely won't do it next gen.
They have customizations on the command processor side that haven't been leveraged yet that can drastically reduce the load caused by draw calls on the CPU. There just _might_ be enough stuff within X1X to possibly allow them to skip a generation and hold on while they continue to progress on their own goals.
So 2019 doesn't seem ideal to me, but that's just imo of course. I guess we'll know in 12 months.
