Sorry, I mistook your joke for snobbery.
Personally, I'd love a PS5 Pro Duo a few years down the line, when 3nm is economically feasible: a doubled PS5, consisting of 2 PS5 APU's as chiplets connected to ~2-4GB of HBM as a cross-chiplet cache.
For a while I thought HBM would also maybe be doable for a mid-gen refresh, but having had some time to think on it more (and reading other posts here in the 10th-gen speculation thread...I gotta post some more stuff there), HBM might be too much of a shift for the coding models devs have gotten used to on GDDR memories. Plus I'm pretty sure the compression for data bandwidth on the new GPUs is much better than it was on PS4 and XBO, so they should be able to even more efficiently make use of their GDDR6 bandwidth.
HBM would also require redesigning a lot of the APU to account for an interposer, redesign the whole motherboard layout and configuration plus a PS5 Pro would probably still need liquid metal cooling and I'm not exactly sure how that'd play with integrating on an interposer for an HBM2 or HBM2E (or maybe HBMNext, which is basically HBM2E but Micron's version) memory.
It would certainly be expensive, but I think that's the purpose of the higher tier model. The base PS5's APU isn't particularly large, and will be tiny on 3nm. It'll also be child's play to power and cool on that node. 14gbps GDDR6 won't be all that expensive in a few years' time either.
It's not really about the size, but the fact that smaller nodes will cost more money. Microsoft basically gave indication of this with their Hot Chips presentation but I think a lot of that is applicable with Sony as well. So even shrinking down the current PS5 GPU to 3nm, would be very expensive (plus they may have to compete with Apple on fabs, that could artificially increase the pricing), and then we're talking about doubling the GPU hardware on top of that? That's a big ask for BOM costs.
14gbps GDDR6 probably will drop down in price, but unless 4 GB capacities come about, a 72 CU PS5 Pro would be bandwidth and capacity-starved. They could clamshell 16 2GB modules I guess, but that sounds like it'd wipe out the cost savings on the lower costs of 14Gbps chips. It doubles their capacity, though, but that's partly what would add to the pricing increase.
So the cheap, lower end will be taken care of by the base console. Why also aim for the also cheap, but slightly less low end of the market? In an era of $1000 consumer GPU's?
Release a $700 PS5 Pro Duo in 2025 and spend the next 5 years getting to a point where a more refined design can be sold at $500 as the PS6.
Personally think a PS5 Pro in 2025 is a kinda too little, too late. Sony'll probably want a PS6 by 2027 at latest, however it's possible they could go for 2026 as well. That's probably the earliest for a PS6. PS5 Pro, if they even do it, probably would be around 2023 is my guess. I doubt it'd be 3nm tho.
Would a 72CU chip even be much larger than that of the XSX? Or if Sony were to go with a chiplet design, they'd have a single chip design to bin according to whether one goes in the base model or two go in the Pro model. Might that be enough to offset some of the cost of more expensive 3nm manufacturing?
I kinda think so. People already say the Series X's chip is way larger than PS5's, and that's just a CU difference of 14. 52 to 72 jumps that difference up to 20. You could maybe look at it as a percentage, and percentage-wise it'd be smaller from Series X to PS5 Pro than it is from Series X to PS5. But workload scaling doesn't care for percentages in that regard, just what CUs are there, how many and therefore how many need be targeted for optimal saturation of the hardware.
Considering it as a chiplet of 2x 36 CU chiplets with one to go in a base model to cover costs of the Pro one is interesting, though. I guess they could try for something like that, it's basically what they did with the PS4 and PS4 Pro (not in terms of any repurposed chiplet designs but just the role the base unit served to offset costs on the Pro model).
I'm not so sure. I think this go around, with a solid GPU architecture, a solid CPU architecture, and solid IO, there's scope for rolling generations. An adequately powerful PS5 Pro could be a fairly limited PS6.
But rolling generations is more something Microsoft seems to be pushing for, not Sony. I've not seen anyone from Sony talk about their future console designs in a generation-less like context, but we've seen guys like Phil Spencer refer to implicating such for Series X and S directly. How true or untrue it is comes down to perception and we'll see if Microsoft commits to that with gradual regular hardware refreshes every 2 or so years under the Series moniker.
With rolling generations and a substantially powerful PS5 Pro, the PS6 doesn't need to be much more powerful. If the PS5 Pro is 20.5 TF's, the PS6 could be 72CU's clocked at 2.8GHz for 25.8TF's. The same principle can apply across the board.
True but only if Sony commits to concept of rolling generations, but that doesn't seem to be their mondus operandi at present. I don't think it's Mark Cerny's, either, and as long as he's the lead designer on PS consoles, I expect Sony to stick with hard breaks (aside from BC which would roll over to the next system) with gen to gen.
Part of what helps selling that is providing clear upgrades in performance from the old to the new. Personally I think PS6 (and Microsoft's 10th-gen whatever it's called) will be a lot more performant than 25 or so TF; not so much in terms of raw numbers but in technologies they'll have for offloading a lot of tasks that'd otherwise require raw compute, to dedicated silicon integrated into the designs. Although, that could be a bit less so in Microsoft's case unless they could push some of that type of work to PC space en masse (or, if they can get develop equivalent algorithms for that stuff that scale with general compute on the GPU, they could do both).
Moore's law is slowing down, game development time is increasing. I really think the generations can afford to last longer - something like 10 years rather than 6 - and adequately powerful mid-gen consoles are the way to achieve that IMO.
Oh goodness, I hope it's not 10 years xD. I do agree Moore's Law is slowing down, but there are some innovative approaches that can be taken to combat it. In some ways, those approaches are already being done, though some are in growing pains. Game dev time and costs are something that REALLY need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. New funding models, big growth in AI models to assist with programming GPT-style (and asset generation), will be the two biggest ways of doing so.
The latter, though, well there's an ethical line to keep in mind because you'll still need a human element present to curate what the AI creates, specialize it etc. But devs also need to ensure they don't have entire workforces replaced with automation, like what's happened to the car industry.
Anyway that's all talk going way off onto another tangent xD.
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