How on earth is that going to work with load times and flash? Are we looking at 3 minute load times every time you want to play a game? Or do you think they'll bite the bullet at launch for substantial fast flash knowing the price will drop below HDD costs, thus enabling very cheap SKUs down the line while preserving target performance across the entire system?
So the question is which type of flash availabe?
1. Fast, more expensive flash and the controller or
2. Slower, cheaper and possibly larger flash and the controller.
I think there is a justification to loss lead when an even more significant proportion of your consoles costs are going to come down significantly in price even over the first year. The read/write properties of the flash installed in the weakest SKU of the first console released defines the abilities of the console, so even if it gets faster in the future it won't be of much help in terms of raising the capability of the console. For example Sony PS3s are probably still limited by the expected read speeds of the 20/40GB HDDs read speeds and they can't expect a higher streaming rate than that, though you already know this sir!
So theres 3 components to your flash drives speed.
1. Number of chips. The speed scales almost linealy with a good controller. So for example, 1 SD card = 20MB/s read, 10MB/s write. Two SD cards = 40MB/S read, 20MB/s write and so on.
2. Quality of chips. If you use an individual 40MB/s flash chip which costs more initially and install 4 of them you get twice the potential speed of the previous example SD chips or the same speed for half the number.
3. The quality of the controller. We've seen this area is of the greatest importance, although because there are multiple sources of this its not an issue for cost control, however they do need to pick a good one to make the most of the flash and to not give funny performance characteristics.
Lastly theres sort of a fourth consideration as well. Because the game engine talks only to the SSD controller, the quantity and size of the flash behind it can change as the flash controller itself deals with the allocation. So what that means is that, so long as the performance remains the same or higher the console manufacturer can transition to using fewer, smaller chips with higher capacity as the technology matures or even migrate to newer technology if they can find an appropriate controller to fit.
So what way would a console manufacturer go? The most likely direction the console manufacturer would go is to balance more towards speed than capacity in the budget for say a launch console. Capacity can be increased at three 2 yearly intervals, but once the speed is determined it will determine the ability of the console for the remainder of its useful life.
