PS3 internals

[London Geezer]

You linked to a 7900GS. Which, while being g71 based like RSX, only has 20 pixel shaders and 7 vertex shaders active, is clocked lower and with slower memory.

So I think the $129 is probably pretty close to the real cost of a GPU with 256MB RAM mounted on a substrate similar to what mobile GPUs use.

Cheers

I'm sorry but the difference in pixel & vertex shaders "active" and clock differences between the two chips (it's basically the same processor!) will never make up the difference in cost for a whole board, a 256-bit memory interface and 256MB of GDDR3, all the different video outputs and the PCIe bus.

And if Sony are making the chip themselves, it's likely to be even cheaper for them to manufacture.

 

[nonamer]

http://www.isuppli.com/news/xbox/

For review they thought the Xbox 360 cost $525 to make. That's somehow gotten down to $323 now.

PS: Personally I expect the semiconductor parts of the PS3 to be close to that of the Xbox 360. The higher quality parts and Bluray drive are probably the main source of extra cost.

 

[London Geezer]

Actually i just checked and in the breakdown there is not listing for the GDDR3... Does that mean that it's under the "Other Components" (which i'm still trying to figure out how they got to $148), or is it included in the RSX cost? If that's the case, and the $129 is for the RSX and the GDDR3, then that's quite cheap.
Still, what's the $148 for other components?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The only difference would be that tracks are packed closer together.

Firstly that requires much more accurate motors to control the head. Motors of that accuracy probably aren't hugely mainstream at the moment, so will cost. The head is very pricey too, not only having the blue diode, but also red lasers for the CD+DVD capabilities The general precision of everything needs to be better controlled to. Even though DVDs may spin faster, the percentage error in the data reads is higher in BRD where the data tracks are finer. If a DVD drive can read with a 5% margin of wobble, that might well be too much for BRD. I don't think their price is totally unreasonable for the BRD drive.

As for the GPU, as you pointed out, on-chip RAM is going to up the cost beyond a GPU card. The price for that doesn't seem unreasonable either.

Not sure about the misc prices though. They have Manufacturing Costs at $40, and yet at the top Other Components and Manufacturing for $148. Isn't that counting Manufacturing twice? And then again for $2.50! I can't factor what other costs there are (the mobo's just 4 big processors on a slab of empty PCB!), certainly not to the tune of $100 if the RSX price includes RAM.

BTW - When they say about chips having 1200 pins, what other chips are there? Is that the count for G70(71)? Or is RSX a rarity, in which case why so many pins!

 

[nonamer]

BTW - When they say about chips having 1200 pins, what other chips are there? Is that the count for G70(71)? Or is RSX a rarity, in which case why so many pins!

RSX is a G80 confirmed.

 

[Mmmkay]

Actually i just checked and in the breakdown there is not listing for the GDDR3... Does that mean that it's under the "Other Components" (which i'm still trying to figure out how they got to $148), or is it included in the RSX cost? If that's the case, and the $129 is for the RSX and the GDDR3, then that's quite cheap.
Still, what's the $148 for other components?

>.<

In Table 3 it mentions "** Samsung has significant DRAM content (~$30) which is integrated into the Nvidia GPU that content was considered in this ranking"

They counted the GDDR3 RAM cost with RSX.

 

[PeterT]

This estimate is not that bad, what I don't get is the cost for the IO bridge, the BR drive and especially the "other components". If you take these down to more reasonable (from my POV) levels, the 60 GB model would cost them $50 to $100.

 

[RobertR1]

I wonder if they take into account yield issues...

For the record, they estimated the Toshiba HD DVD player to be around $800 BOM also (with much less exotics parts and such) so I take their analysis with a grain of salt.

 

[Arun]

Considering RSX is a 240mm2 chip, that puts it at ~260 chips per wafer. Let's say 200 of those are usable. With an exagerated wafer cost of $10K, that's $50/chip. Add $10 for packaging and $40 for the memory chips, both of which are probably too high, and then finally about $5 for NVIDIA. Heck, let's add another $5 for other minor costs, such as shipping the chips around, amortizing the NVIDIA NRE/License fees, etc... And you're still only at $100.

That's basically the most conservative estimate you could make. It's overly high in every single conceivable way. And it's still $30 lower than those guys' numbers. Yay?


Uttar

 

[London Geezer]

Considering RSX is a 240mm2 chip, that puts it at ~260 chips per wafer. Let's say 200 of those are usable. With an exagerated wafer cost of $10K, that's $50/chip. Add $10 for packaging and $40 for the memory chips, both of which are probably too high, and then finally about $5 for NVIDIA. Heck, let's add another $5 for other minor costs, such as shipping the chips around, amortizing the NVIDIA NRE/License fees, etc... And you're still only at $100.

That's basically the most conservative estimate you could make. It's overly high in every single conceivable way. And it's still $30 lower than those guys' numbers. Yay?


Uttar

Thanks. It does feel like they slapped a nice 20% or more on top of most elements in the table.

 

[nonamer]

It's kinda interesting how they got 129 and 89 for RSX and BE respectively. It's almost like they brought them from a retail store.

Assuming a couple hundred dollar overcharge, is the PS3 pretty close to break-even?

 

[London Geezer]

It's kinda interesting how they got 129 and 89 for RSX and BE respectively. It's almost like they brought them from a retail store.

Exactly. They are odd prices (that's the real marketing term, not kidding), and as such it is just very weird they would come up in a cost estimate. Odd prices are a sort of marketing tool to make consumer get the impression that something is cheaper than other things. Example: A $999 HDTV will have a different impact on people's mind than a $1000 HDTV. You would be surprised at how much of a difference that makes on sales, it's really quite amazing. And it works for all those things (the majority of products really!) with the .99 at the end, or all prices finishing with a 9 at the end.

Point of this is, as an estimate of a cost and therefore nothing to do with consumers or marketing, those numbers with 9's at the end just ring bells to me, they should be even prices (that is also the marketing term for... erm... even prices).

 

[Bobbler]

Oddly, I'll have to agree with iSupply. This seems far more reasonable than the merryl one, even though they came up with similar prices in the end.

After seeing the videos of them dismantling one, I can't imagine that thing being cheap to produce at all at this point. The per part prices seem pretty reasonable from what I saw and actual manufacturing + other parts eat up a decent amount of cost (which seems very likely).

From the inside, the PS3 looks fantastically made, but definitely not cheap to produce. Over time it looks like there are tons of places where costs will fall dramatically, so I don't think there's much reason to be concerned about that. It'll no doubt be more expensive than X360 over it's lifetime, but I think they'll actually get pretty close to each other in the end (PSthree and whatever X360 lite is called).

 

[London Geezer]

Oddly, I'll have to agree with iSupply. This seems far more reasonable than the merryl one, even though they came up with similar prices in the end.

After seeing the videos of them dismantling one, I can't imagine that thing being cheap to produce at all at this point. The per part prices seem pretty reasonable from what I saw and actual manufacturing + other parts eat up a decent amount of cost (which seems very likely).

From the inside, the PS3 looks fantastically made, but definitely not cheap to produce. Over time it looks like there are tons of places where costs will fall dramatically, so I don't think there's much reason to be concerned about that. It'll no doubt be more expensive than X360 over it's lifetime, but I think they'll actually get pretty close to each other in the end (PSthree and whatever X360 lite is called).

I'm still trying to figure out what that $148 for "other components and manufacturing" is. I thought it could have been the PSU, but the PSU is accounted for in its own line... So it's really strange, there are no more components (surely not $148 worth of them) on the PS3 apart from the ones listed there. And manufacturing is already accounted for too. Twice.
The rest seems ok, bit inflated here and there (see RSX) but ok.

 

[nonamer]

The only obvious thing missing in the BoM is the built-in flash RAM for the firmware. It's probably at least 128MB and maybe 256MB+. Still, given how cheap flash RAM is these days this can't cost more than $50 and probably more like $20. I would definitely ax about $100 from the "other" part, and about another $50 from the chip costs, and I would still be conservative.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Considering RSX is a 240mm2 chip, that puts it at ~260 chips per wafer. Let's say 200 of those are usable. With an exagerated wafer cost of $10K, that's $50/chip. Add $10 for packaging and $40 for the memory chips, both of which are probably too high, and then finally about $5 for NVIDIA. Heck, let's add another $5 for other minor costs, such as shipping the chips around, amortizing the NVIDIA NRE/License fees, etc... And you're still only at $100.

50+10+40+5+5 = 110...

I think a lot depends on the yields. Do we know 200/160 is about right? Could it be as bad as 150/260? Similar estimates for the Cell pegged the cost lower, and then we got yield figures from IBM that weren't particularly great. Is there anywhere to get yield results, or estimate yield results, for these chips?

 

[Rangers]

This is a completely retarded BOM. These guys are terrible.

Off the top of my head..$129 for RSX? That chip likely costs like 50 bucks. Maybe 70...

the reason a HDD is included in the PlayStation 3 is to store the mathematical modeling based on physics for the motion and impact of the various game objects.

What?

I also noticed, the GDDR is nowhere to be found in the report..probably because they didn't physically see it because it's under that heatspreader. So I guess they completely dont know it exists. Nice product knowledge these guy have..

Some of their conclusions may be broadly right, aka the PS3 BOM surely is $600-$800, but they are just scattershooting in the dark to arrive there..
________
CALIFORNIA DISPENSARY

 

[London Geezer]

This is a completely retarded BOM. These guys are terrible.

Off the top of my head..$129 for RSX? That chip likely costs like 50 bucks. Maybe 70...


I also noticed, the GDDR is nowhere to be found in the report..probably because they didn't physically see it because it's under that heatspreader. So I guess they completely dont know it exists. Nice product knowledge these guy have..

Mmm nope, we already covered that. GDDR cost is included in the RSX figure.

the reason a HDD is included in the PlayStation 3 is to store the mathematical modeling based on physics for the motion and impact of the various game objects.

Yeah.. that was... odd..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is a completely retarded BOM. These guys are terrible.

Off the top of my head..$129 for RSX? That chip likely costs like 50 bucks. Maybe 70...

It's all very well people giving figures ($50, $125) but without explanations, they could just be random guesses. How do you know RSX is $50-70? Have you seen figures on yields perhaps from which they can be calculated? Or have you examples of similar chips that are priced at $70? There seems to be a lot of pie-in-the-sky guess-work when we talk about chip costs, and it'd be nice to have some real examples from which to derive prices!

 

[Dave Baumann]

It looks like they're including the GDDR3 cost with the chip, since it's not referenced anywhere else in the BoM. Still seems a bit on the steep side though, taking that into account.

That would probably encompass silicon, RAM and packaging costs all in one.

I figured this would be an expensive board.