PS4 initial cost analysis

[Cyan]

Oh how I would love for Sony to just walk walk up to the mic and say 299.

Me too, I plan on buying the PS4 and the Xbox Infinity? But as @eastmen pointed out already, that's highly unlikely.

Do the laws of thermodynamics sound familiar to you and Einstein's theory about energy? Same happens with money in some way. :smile2:The PS4 is not very conventional for a console, cost / heat generation -GDDR5- wise, and Sony will try to commercialize a cheaper implementation with a different distribution of the chips and smaller yields and so on over time ... which is pretty normal if you ask me. But until that happens the price is most likely to be around 400-500$.

 

[rockaman]

I'm preparing my wallet already

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Even that would never have been discovered without the usb repair dongle that someone stole and reverse engineered.

Yes, but you have to factor that into security. The human element is always prevalent, and you have to take measures to deal with leaks of some form, such as changeable keys.

I was always amazed this generation at how Sony locked down their hardware this generation. Is hardware security getting ahead of homebrew hackers now?

I should hope so. Hardware security has closed down a lot of easy attack vectors. You can't just prod and poke around with the hardware and inject code into memory spaces with buffer overruns. That said, a quick Google reveals game exploits on Vita that enable homebrew, so Sony haven't been able to tighten up their portable as tightly as their console...

 

[Arwin]

I am assuming that as Sony did with Vita, launch price has been made a priority and the launch price was one of the first things set in advance. I would assume that this is 399, and would be highly surprised if we see any other pricepoint.

 

[tunafish]

OK well when you put it that way... Lol, I definitely hope not then too...

I was always amazed this generation at how Sony locked down their hardware this generation. Is hardware security getting ahead of homebrew hackers now?

I only ask because is there some critical point where hackers self learning gets to a rough limit? Why are the new consoles more difficult? I always wondered if it was because PS3 hardware security is so much stronger or are the systems just getting significantly more complicated that they are much harder to hack, or are these simply one in the same?

No. More complicated systems are easier to hack because of higher risk of faults. x86 is really easy to hack because of 4 decades of accumulated crap.

Sony survived last gen as long as they did because of the OtherOS support. The kind of people who are capable of attacking consoles rarely do it to pirate games, they do it to run whatever they feel like on their own systems, and then the pirates use their work. OtherOS let the homebrew crowd do what they wanted on PS3, so there were no major attacks until it went away. After OtherOS went away, PS3 fell in a few months, and turned out to be much worse protected than the 360 -- because of random number generator fail by Sony, we can not only run unsigned software on them, we can sign games so that they are indistinguishable from ones signed by Sony.

 

[3dcgi]

No. More complicated systems are easier to hack because of higher risk of faults. x86 is really easy to hack because of 4 decades of accumulated crap.

Sony survived last gen as long as they did because of the OtherOS support. The kind of people who are capable of attacking consoles rarely do it to pirate games, they do it to run whatever they feel like on their own systems, and then the pirates use their work. OtherOS let the homebrew crowd do what they wanted on PS3, so there were no major attacks until it went away. After OtherOS went away, PS3 fell in a few months, and turned out to be much worse protected than the 360 -- because of random number generator fail by Sony, we can not only run unsigned software on them, we can sign games so that they are indistinguishable from ones signed by Sony.

I saw an interesting presentation on YouTube last year (might have been a google tech talk) about console security. Their conclusion was security has improved, but as you said the best hackers just want to run Linux so by allowing Linux the PS3 didn't get hacked for a long time.

 

[babybumb]

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1713020&postcount=71

In fact they could have designed it around 16 1Gb GDDR5 chips in clamshell mode (2GB according to the earliest rumors) then upped it to 4GB with 2Gb chips and eventually when 4Gb chips came into play upped it to 8GB.

If they designed it for 16 GDDR5 chips all along.. does the pricing stay similar for the newest chip from 1Gb->2Gb->4Gb?

 

[BRiT]

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1713020&postcount=71

If they designed it for 16 GDDR5 chips all along.. does the pricing stay similar for the newest chip from 1Gb->2Gb->4Gb?

The memory chip pricing does not follow the linear 2x cost increase line. Using the higher density chips carry a hefty price premium.

 

[MrFox]

Sony survived last gen as long as they did because of the OtherOS support. The kind of people who are capable of attacking consoles rarely do it to pirate games, they do it to run whatever they feel like on their own systems, and then the pirates use their work. OtherOS let the homebrew crowd do what they wanted on PS3, so there were no major attacks until it went away.

It's the OtherOS that allowed the hack. It never would have happened if there wasn't an OtherOS from the start.
Security researchers do it for fame in their field.

- Researcher spend years trying to hack the PS3 using OtherOS
- Researcher finds a hack using a stolen usb repair key
- Fame and fortune awaits! Leak the specifics of the hack to the pirate community. Take credit for the hack. Get a date with Angelina Jolie (ok no that one didn't happen)
- Sony analyses the hack and determines OtherOS is now a gaping security hole, can no longer be contained.
- No more OtherOS

Can you f*cking blame them?

 

[Vic]

People hoping for a $300 launch price are dreaming. Even the Vita was that much for the 3G model.

I'm expecting a UK price of £350, so a US price of at least $400.

 

[upnorthsox]

The memory chip pricing does not follow the linear 2x cost increase line. Using the higher density chips carry a hefty price premium.

That would go against the grain as most everything else follows Moore's Law.

 

[BRiT]

That would go against the grain as most everything else follows Moore's Law.

No, it doesn't. Moore's Law has nothing to do with pricing.

The fact I stated follows the general trend with everything else that is technology based -- normal PC RAM pricing, normal PC Hard Drive pricing, normal PC SSD pricing. The price for the product is more than the linear scale the doubling would suggest.

 

[upnorthsox]

No, it doesn't. Moore's Law has nothing to do with pricing.

The fact I stated follows the general trend with everything else that is technology based -- normal PC RAM pricing, normal PC Hard Drive pricing, normal PC SSD pricing. The price for the product is more than the linear scale the doubling would suggest.

Density, which was what you mentioned. Pricing is a universal issue.

 

[BRiT]

I think you misread what I wrote.

What I stated was talking about the PRICE of moving from 1GB to 2GB to 4GB chips as asked in the original post:

does the pricing stay similar for the newest chip from 1Gb->2Gb->4Gb?

The memory chip pricing does not follow the linear 2x cost increase line. Using the higher density chips carry a hefty price premium.

IE: The cost does NOT follow this linear 2x cost increase pattern: $X for 1GB -> $2X for 2GB -> $4X for 4GB.

 

[RedVi]

I'm thinking $399 for budget SKU at a slight loss and $499 or maybe a little less for the premium at a small gain.

I doubt 4Gb GDDR5 will cost over $100 for 16 chips considering the quantities they'll be ordering in.

 

[Gubbi]

IE: The cost does NOT follow this linear 2x cost increase pattern: $X for 1GB -> $2X for 2GB -> $4X for 4GB.

The production cost for the bigger chips should be lower, since there is less cutting and packaging.

However, the 2gbit market is naturally segmented. The fast chips goes into the high capacity, high end SKUs (4GB/256 bit, 3 or 6GB/ 384 bit) , and the slower chips goes into low and mid end products (1-2GB/128 bit, 2GB/256 bit). Everybody goes home a winner here. The DRAM producers sees demand for all bins of their chips. The GPU vendors get cheap and slow memory for their cheap and slow products and fast and expensive memory for their fast and expensive products

On top of that, because everybody uses 2gbit chips, it has great economy of scale to put downwards pressure on price.

The problem for 4gbit chips, is the market is currently virtually non-existent and will be tiny for the next year or two. These high capacity chips will only see use in the very highest end products, hence only the very fastest bins will be used.

Sony needs to optimize for costs, so going with slow GDDR5 is the only real option. Sony will pick up all the garbage speed bins of 4gbit GDDR5. The question is if there will be enough left over.

Cheers

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I'm wondering if both console makers are going to be hit hard by the rather dramatic price increases for memory that the industry is experiencing at the moment?

For example the same 2x8 GB DDR3 1866 memory kit that I got 3 months ago for ~60 USD is now 99 USD.

There's a similar price increase for all memory across the board it seems. I'd imagine they locked in memory prices for bulk memory prior to the increase in prices. But generally you don't want to lock in a price for more than 1-2 years as memory prices have traditionally dropped over time. But in this case, if they only locked in memory prices short term, then those same consoles may be either more expensive to manufacture or have difficulty cost reducing the BOM after a year or two.

And if they were projecting memory prices to drop, there's also a chance they didn't lock in a price contract before memory prices started to rise.

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

THe cost change in DDR3 could be them moving to DDR 4 or larger capacity chips for ddr 3.

But i'm guessing its due to the mobile demand for ram

 

[dagamer]

I'm wondering if both console makers are going to be hit hard by the rather dramatic price increases for memory that the industry is experiencing at the moment?

For example the same 2x8 GB DDR3 1866 memory kit that I got 3 months ago for ~60 USD is now 99 USD.

There's a similar price increase for all memory across the board it seems. I'd imagine they locked in memory prices for bulk memory prior to the increase in prices. But generally you don't want to lock in a price for more than 1-2 years as memory prices have traditionally dropped over time. But in this case, if they only locked in memory prices short term, then those same consoles may be either more expensive to manufacture or have difficulty cost reducing the BOM after a year or two.

And if they were projecting memory prices to drop, there's also a chance they didn't lock in a price contract before memory prices started to rise.

Regards,
SB

Well, first, DDR3 isn't the same as GDDR5, also, that's the whole point of a contract, to reduce price fluctuations. As the end consumer, we see price fluctuations because demand from companies who have locked up supply at X price point means they try to maximize profit on whatever they have left. Sometimes it's a little, other times it's a lot.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

An update coming up

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=63544051&postcount=505

Started work on the revision today. Early indications - we overshot by a significant amount in the initial analysis and Sony save around $17 off the BoM by not including the Eye, MS could save 4x that amount if they didn't include Kinect.

The guy we sent to E3 is writing his hardware impressions report having talked seen it and talked to Sony experts about it.

GDDR5 costs are the biggest overshoot, and we have preliminary yield estimates for the PS4 APU from a contact in the semi-conductors industry and they are a bit higher than we estimated in the initial analysis also. We have also revised the APU die size downwards slightly so with the higher yield estimate and lower die size there will be more dice per wafer, lowering the costs slightly for that too.

All in all I could see Sony shipping the box at break even in Europe and only for a slight loss in the US.

We'll probably have the detailed breakdown done by the middle of next week.