I can't tell if you want a more capitalist presence due to the lack of competition in your area, or a more socialist one due to the lack of enforced regulation on lifting the data caps.
Unfortunately, it seems you're getting none of either.
Just so you know, the RX 6700XT reviews are going live and those chips are actually averaging at 2.55GHz with
some 3rd party cards doing stable overclocks up to >2.8GHz.
RDNA2 is way past the PS5's 2.23GHz at this point, and those clocks seems to be closer to what we should expect on mobile dGPUs.
And according to Bondrewd, higher clocks than these on RDNA2 were targeted at some point, for both the PS5 and the RDNA2 dGPUs.
RDNA3 on N5P seems to be targeting for 3GHz+ on higher-binned parts.
Whatever work AMD's Zen engineers did for RTG to increase clocks, it seems to be working quite well.
That's very good news! So it's actually very possible they could do a PS5 Slim design on 5nm and clock the GPU up (I gave 2.5 GHz as an example) while still getting much better power consumption performance than what they have currently. I wasn't crazy after all xD.
I'm actually pretty surprised at how aggressively AMD are able to push GPU clocks so soon. 3+ GHz for RDNA 3 without overclocking would be very good, I'm curious how far they can push the clocks with future architecture iterations, particularly for new consoles while keeping respectable power consumption targets.
Yeah the focus for a slim is simply to provide a cheaper console but with good margins for Sony. Increasing processor clocks increases power consumption exponentially so its really not necessary for a PS5 slim. Maybe what they may be able to do is completely eliminate amd shift such that the PS5 slim has fixed clocks 2.23GHz GPU and 3.6GHz for the CPU. They need the slim console to sell at or below $350 while having better margins than the OG console. Those things would sell like hot cakes.
Good points here as always, tho with the info
@ToTTenTranz provided in their post apparently there's a LOT of wiggle room for clocks on RDNA architecture. If PC RDNA 2 cards are able to hit around 2.8 GHz already with overclocks on 7nm EUV, does that necessarily make a PS5 Slim with a more modest upclock on the GPU (say to 2.5 GHz) on 5nm look like such a tough thing to pull off while still enjoying the power consumption reduction benefits, more refined 5nm node process, and higher margins? It gives some hope
True that increasing the clocks even a tad will exponentially increase power consumption and thermals (though the relationship between those two isn't 1:1, either), but we can kind of look at the....6800 I believe (that's the 40 CU RDNA 2 GPU correct?), see what power consumption and thermals are for that clocked at 2.5 GHz, and reduce power consumption costs by 30% to give a rough estimate of what a PS5 Slim at those clocks would hit at. Knock a bit more off of that, actually, because you'd have 4 less active CUs and no IC, bringing more savings on the power consumption and thermals.
I'm not so sure Sony will actually want to do away with variable clocks; one of the benefits of that vs. fixed clocks (and, we can look at PCs as an example for this benefit too) is that for games where clocks have an impact on extracting better performance, powering through with clocks at their peak will basically give "free" boosts to performance for those games. We've seen this already with several 3P games on PS5 relative to Series X. The drawback of course is, it's a pain on thermals because you're always running at peak clocks except when load forces downclocking, but if base PS5 is still sitting at decent power consumption amounts even with the implementation, it would seem desirable to continue with it in a Slim. Plus, removing it for a Slim would screw things up majorly for PS5 games coding with variable frequency in mind, it'd probably be too big of a design shift to be worth implementing.
To be honest I was also in the camp that pro versions wouldn't make sense this gen because they wouldn't be as easy to market as the previous gen's pro versions. And I still think so, but if they can get higher margins on a pro console then they might just do it. Imagine a PS5 pro released 3 years from now, with a GPU roughly equivalent to a 6800XT and a better CPU, while being considerably slimmer. If retailing at $499, it could be marketed as pro model that offers higher fps at 4K. With this they'd simply discontinue the current PS5 and sell a PS5 slim($300-$349) and a PS5 pro($499-$549). Games would be designed around the PS5 slim(so also working on the OG PS5) and scaled up to the pro version for "higher performance". If the pro doesn't pan out then they can simply sell a slimmer PS5 with higher margins. $399 for disc model and $299-$349 for the discless model. This would be a huge hit. Only concern is the cost of DRAM and NAND.
I didn't consider the prospect of extract higher profit margins from a Pro margin into it, that's definitely something they could use to justify it. But will the fanbase bite if they don't see the benefit outside of it just being a "Pro" model? Sony could run the risk of looking greedy IMO if they tried it without giving the hardware a purpose. I guess it would keep them at parity with Microsoft if Microsoft does a Series X mid-gen upgrade too but, again, it's not like the PS4 Pro sold gangbusters in the first place. I'm sure it was profitable for Sony but by a large amount? Likely not.
So if they want to try a "Pro" PS5 model, I'm guessing they'd just rather go with increasing the storage capacity. I would've said in the past that another factor for maybe doing a PS5 Pro would've been to keep PS gamers from drifting to PC but, again, there was little drift during the PS4 Era and I don't think PS4 Pro was the reason why seeing that it did a paltry number of lifetime units compared to base PS4. Plus, Sony seems more open to doing PC ports of their games, if the purpose of the consoles is to essentially keep selling software in the ecosystem they can save on R&D costs and production/distribution costs and encourage more support for their releases on PC (probably through EGS) by just handling ports that way that are enhanced say a year or so after the PS5 versions.
That encourages the hardcore fans to double-dip on PC more readily, entices PC players more, and allows them to push enhanced versions that can leverage powerful setups (more powerful than whatever PS5 Pro they could develop and release) to show off what the 1P teams can do with that type of hardware. Those who want the games Day 1 still have to buy on PS5 (or PS5 Slim), and porting them to PC with enhanced copies isn't going to impact the vast majority of PS gamers as that majority of mainstream gamers who simply choose to play on console out of convenience regardless. Tho some of this depends on the nature of Sony's deal with Epic on EGS, though EGS already gives a much bigger cut to publishers on it versus Steam or GOG tbf.
Node process for PS6 and Next Xbox is very interesting. Been thinking for a long time it'd be N3P. Why? Because you still get a lot of performance increase from that at console-appropriate TDPs, AMD's architecture seems very friendly with high clocks, it'll be a very matured and cost-effective node by 2026/2027/2028, and hardware accelerators will probably benefit from having that surplus in budgets.
For sure 2nm or maybe even smaller than that will be around by time of 10th-gen but I don't think 10th-gen systems actually need much smaller than N3P to be substantial jumps over the 9th-gen systems. And that's not a slight at PS5 or Series X; they're beasts. But 10th-gen will have its own needs to satisfy and I think both Microsoft and Sony will want to save on costs where they can. Very mature and less expensive N3P vs. more expensive and less mature 2nm or sub-2nm, which looks more attractive for a console when you've already got GPU architectures playing super-nice with high clocks on even 7nm, and advent of hardware accelerators coming into the picture in future iterations to intelligently give big boosts in performance without need for massive TF increases?
