I miss the old times when slim consoles were really slim and prices would fall more. Cant believe the PS4 price reduction and form factor barely changed compared to PS2 and PS1 eras. These consoles were becoming more affordable and smaller. PS3 dudnt change much either
Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]
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I don’t know, PS3 roughly halved over the generation £425-£200 IIRC) whereas PS4 is only around 25% cheaper than launch I think and still sold significantly more than PS3.
Ironically today if you get a PS5 you can sell it easily for 30% more than RRP, he’ll even CEX will give you £100 just to sell it to them!! It’s madness.
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PS4 ran hot which limited how small a chassis Sony could use. PS5 probably has better scope for slimming down, particularly a digital edition as it's jus a bunch of chips on a board.
You probably meant without dedicated hardware (so basically without ID Buffer) as it probably uses the shaders. Traditionnaly fully software means only CPU.
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Intel certainly seems to believe Horizon Zero Dawn's checkerboard solution was dependant on hardware ID buffers. I get all my Horizon Zero Dawn info from Intel.
It's kind of different though. Often those bigger laptops do have better parts inside. Bigger laptop with same parts as smaller laptop often is cheaper as seen when comparing something premium like dell xps13 to something non premium with same soc, ram, ssd.
edit. in ps5 case I suspect cooling solution would be the expensive part when making console smaller. Maybe the motherboard would also be marginally more expensive when made smaller. Of course the alternative would be to allow the console to become noisier and hotter to allow for cheaper cooling. If 5nm or 3nm pans out in future that should allow significantly smaller ps5 to be made. The actual design based on the tear down looks fairly simple and not exotic at all. Other than the liquid metal usage which is as high tech as it gets.
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The PS2 slim is basically all drive under the drive door, you could cut all that space out. And the later models even included an internal power supply!
That's...actually a good point. With scalpers buying these systems in large bulks, that's a decent chunk of lost additional revenue because these scalpers aren't buying PSN/XBL accounts, they aren't buying peripherals, they aren't buying games, etc. So by the time these systems are readily available (maybe by Summer for MS, towards end of the year for Sony), that's basically a year of suppressed sales due to scarcity and scalpers. That's not great.
So that could be motivation for a mid-gen refresh; I don't think jacking the prices up even higher is going to deter scalping though. Sony and Microsoft need to figure a better system for pre-orders. Hell, go old-school and have people mail in hand-written preorder and mail money orders or something; I don't think most scalpers would bother if there's too much literal paperwork at mass scale for them to do trying to game the system.
This is true; 5nm or maybe N5P are the limits of scaling-down for any mid-gen refreshes. But that also can bring between 30% - 40% (I forget specifically what N5P's power consumption reduction amount is over N5).
Even if mid-gen refreshes sizes aren't too much smaller, there's the chance the actual power consumption can be reduced very high on node reduction alone; with some slight architectural changes that could be 50% or more in power consumption reductions.
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It's mostly semantics these days; use of phrasing like 'fully software' doesn't adhere strictly to the traditional definition as it may've in the past. When a lot of people speak of such things in relation to GPU-bound features or processes, it's basically the equivalent of saying you'd have to run it through generic compute on the processor rather than dedicated hardware logic specifically designed for the task.
Hence, "fully software". That's how I tend to look at it these days, anyway.
Halving power consumption could be doable when using n5p. Or maybe the really high clock of ps5 lends itself better for optimization and there is surprisingly good power reduction. I guess it would be possible to use 3nm by adding dead silicon to make chip bigger. I doubt that would be reasonable from cost POV though.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1602...technology-details-full-node-scaling-for-2h22
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1602...technology-details-full-node-scaling-for-2h22
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It gets more complicated because this also of applies to cpus . The new apple m1 is very wide, lower clockspeed design. It's insanely good cpu for its power envelope.
Apple is different beast as they don't need to sell their products with core counts or clockspeeds. Apple can focus to whatever they feel makes best product. This is different than android where people might shop based on specs. Apple also can optimize sw to specific hw whereas android/windows tends to support much wider variety of hw.
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This is the relevant patent filed by AMD for mesh shaders: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ef/96/c3/2e0b7028bbc378/US20200035017A1.pdf
This patent itself is dependent on another filing for fusing shaders: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/93/1b/29/41f6eb09923776/US10353591.pdf
The goals, as set out in the patents, are threefolds:
(1) Exploiting the inherent parallelism of GPUs
(2) Escaping the shackles of fixed function blocks in the pipeline, especially as it pertains to the vertex shader stage.
(3) Making use of only local data storage (caches & registers) by preventing round trips to main memory and thus gaining in latency and keeping bandwidth needs at a minimum.
Does the PS5 has something similar to this ? As I have said before, I do think that it does. There is a very interesting patent from Cerny about the use of compute shaders for index culling/compression prior to the verte shader stage:https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9a/e7/f0/80a69fa1d6553d/US10176621.pdf
Notably:
(1) The use of compute shaders exploit the SIMD nature of GPUs
(2) The implementation of a ring buffer that will store the outputs from the compute shaders to be read by the vertex shaders emphasizes the exclusive use of GPU caches to effect said culling. Very interestingly, this use of a ring buffer calls for synchronisation/coherency between the two shader stages as it relates to the eviction of data from the caches, something reminiscent of the GPU cache scrubbers mentioned by Cerny.
This patent itself is dependent on another filing for fusing shaders: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/93/1b/29/41f6eb09923776/US10353591.pdf
The goals, as set out in the patents, are threefolds:
(1) Exploiting the inherent parallelism of GPUs
(2) Escaping the shackles of fixed function blocks in the pipeline, especially as it pertains to the vertex shader stage.
(3) Making use of only local data storage (caches & registers) by preventing round trips to main memory and thus gaining in latency and keeping bandwidth needs at a minimum.
Does the PS5 has something similar to this ? As I have said before, I do think that it does. There is a very interesting patent from Cerny about the use of compute shaders for index culling/compression prior to the verte shader stage:https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9a/e7/f0/80a69fa1d6553d/US10176621.pdf
Notably:
(1) The use of compute shaders exploit the SIMD nature of GPUs
(2) The implementation of a ring buffer that will store the outputs from the compute shaders to be read by the vertex shaders emphasizes the exclusive use of GPU caches to effect said culling. Very interestingly, this use of a ring buffer calls for synchronisation/coherency between the two shader stages as it relates to the eviction of data from the caches, something reminiscent of the GPU cache scrubbers mentioned by Cerny.
Those scalpers are selling those consoles to someone, though. The end user is going to want controllers, games and services,
It should be noted that mesh shaders do away with need for a ring buffer by fusing/combining shaders. Also, the vertex shader stage is fully programmable.
There are still a number not in hands though because of scalpers, not only that people spending £200 extra on the console have £200 less to spend on extras.
Scalpers have no incentive to keep the console in "stock", I also assume they are "selling out" and if you buy from a scalper you know you are paying an extra premium and have the spare cash to do it and still buy the accessories and games you want.
There are groups of professional scalpers out there, controlled release of minimal stock keeps demand and prices high.
Just because you are prepared to pay the premium for the hardware does not mean you have excess funds, don't forget BC and the PS+ games give an instant catalogue of games for 'free'. The incentive to get the console 'while you can' is strong, we have missed Christmas presents and birthdays etc with no idea when stock will be in usual supply.
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