The pros and cons of eDRAM/ESRAM in next-gen
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
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Silent_Buddha
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It's hard to say whether the PS4 is breaking even or making a profit. If I were to take a wild guess with little to no info (currently available), I'd say they are likely making a profit (on the PS4, not the games division) if you remove the launch costs associated with the PS4.
What is interesting is that revenue decreased YoY (-2.0%) while operating income rose significantly YoY. That means they are likely making significant cuts at the operational level (personnel, facilities, etc.). It will be interesting to see how that impacts their division in the future.
That increase in operating income wasn't enough to save their games division from being unprofitable, however. But, you have to look more deeply to see what is going on. 60 million USD of that 78 million USD loss is accounted for by write-offs of certain unspecified PC games. And an unspecified chunk due to the launch of the PS4.
It is notable that while they were willing to divulge the losses associated with the write-offs of the PC games, they weren't willing to divulge the losses associated with the launch of the PS4. Hence, it makes it difficult to predict how the games division will do in the next quarter.
I'd say next quarter they are likely to either suffer a slight loss or break even. But by Holiday 2014, they should be making a solid profit as game related sales increase significantly due to the impact of the PS4 compared to the summer months when sales are typically slow and no major titles are coming out.
Right now, Sony is just trying desperately to survive. 1.25 billion USD in losses for just this past quarter. And that includes their financial services division. They desperately need their games division to turn profitable.
Regards,
SB
Huh? You seemed to suggest that MS's choice of ESRAM was economical to avoid blowing money on consoles that never make money over the entire product life due to loss-leading hardware, and that not using ESRAM would have destroyed all MS's profits for the generation. Sony's predictions, for which they know exactly the hardware profitability of their PS4 and PS2 consoles, are that their ESRAM free console is going to make them Heap Big Money. This clearly points to ESRAM as a solution to avoiding lossy hardware as being unrequired, and a profitable box can be made without ESRAM.
It doesn't even point to "not getting into the console business avoids financial disaster on the console business" as it's talking about making substantial money from consoles.
It's probably a bit early to make predictions about the lifetime financial performance of a platform just yet.
We're currently at the crest of a DRAM boom-bust cycle, with per bit cost more than twice that of 15 months ago. We are going to see steeply falling commodity DRAM pricing over the next two-three years. It'll be interesting to see if GDDR5 falls at the same pace as DDR3. Either way, the economics of console hardware are going to change significantly.
Cheers
We're currently at the crest of a DRAM boom-bust cycle, with per bit cost more than twice that of 15 months ago. We are going to see steeply falling commodity DRAM pricing over the next two-three years. It'll be interesting to see if GDDR5 falls at the same pace as DDR3. Either way, the economics of console hardware are going to change significantly.
Cheers
Well that graph is missleading somehow, what would be more interesting would be the evolution of the price of memory modules/chips.
Memory modules follows Moore laws so it is not surprising the price per MB goes down.
What is interesting is: "will the difference in price between gddr5 and DDR3 increase?" I don't know.
How low can you get wrt to the number of memory chip tied to 256 bit bus?
Both MSFT and Sony should soon be able to use only 8 8gb memory module. That could be the greatest saving they do on memory throughout the system lifespam, cutting the number of memory chips by 2 will save more than the slow reduction in price of those 8 remaining memory chips.
Will we see 16gb module of DDR3 or GDDR5? Or those 16 gb memory chips are going to be used in another manner, stacked memory and replace both DDR3 (and always pushed back DDR4) and GDDR5?
I don't know either.
I think MSFT biggest advantage wrt price reduction is IF they managed to have the Game OS (and games) portable to different systems. Yukon slides hints that they were working into that direction. The announcement of XB1 upcoming Directx 12 support is another hint, though they set for themselves quite a few architectural hoops to jump through that make that goal harder (from the eSRAM to homemade accelerators).
May have kinect related hardware integrated into kinect (better no proprietary hardware) and the system had run a straightforward UMA system, I would assume that the hypothesis above would be a given, now they can pull it be it will require more efforts and set limitation in what can be done with the eSRAM for the sake of future portability of the games.
Memory modules follows Moore laws so it is not surprising the price per MB goes down.
What is interesting is: "will the difference in price between gddr5 and DDR3 increase?" I don't know.
How low can you get wrt to the number of memory chip tied to 256 bit bus?
Both MSFT and Sony should soon be able to use only 8 8gb memory module. That could be the greatest saving they do on memory throughout the system lifespam, cutting the number of memory chips by 2 will save more than the slow reduction in price of those 8 remaining memory chips.
Will we see 16gb module of DDR3 or GDDR5? Or those 16 gb memory chips are going to be used in another manner, stacked memory and replace both DDR3 (and always pushed back DDR4) and GDDR5?
I don't know either.
I think MSFT biggest advantage wrt price reduction is IF they managed to have the Game OS (and games) portable to different systems. Yukon slides hints that they were working into that direction. The announcement of XB1 upcoming Directx 12 support is another hint, though they set for themselves quite a few architectural hoops to jump through that make that goal harder (from the eSRAM to homemade accelerators).
May have kinect related hardware integrated into kinect (better no proprietary hardware) and the system had run a straightforward UMA system, I would assume that the hypothesis above would be a given, now they can pull it be it will require more efforts and set limitation in what can be done with the eSRAM for the sake of future portability of the games.
D
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Sony's financial call made clear the red was caused by the PS4 launch. There was stockpiling (more storage), high-expense shipping to keep channels as full as possible, particularly in the run up to Christmas, plus marketing and promotions.
You need to ignore financial quarters that include significant hardware launches if you're looking for a baseline for profit/loss analysis.
Sony investors speech
PS4 is hardware profitable. ESRAM was not necessary for MS to produce a lossless hardware.Kaz Hirai said:
It's just a message to the investors, or is backed up by some data?
It's a message to the investors, but Hirai wouldn't be lying. It's also not a SCE report, but an overall Sony report, with Hirai being the CEO now. 
I'll update.
I'll update.eSRAM was necessary to make absolutely sure they would embark 8GB of RAM and not to deal with shifty timelines for those GDDR5 4gb modules.
Now was securing that much memory critical to the system?
My answer is no. Would it have translated into an advantage if the PS4 shipped with 4GB of GDDR5? Yes but it is unclear to which extend it would have affected games /may have presented less benefits to gamers than the extra processing power and UMA memory architecture, still MSFT would have marketing bullet point against Sony.
Now was securing that much memory critical to the system?
My answer is no. Would it have translated into an advantage if the PS4 shipped with 4GB of GDDR5? Yes but it is unclear to which extend it would have affected games /may have presented less benefits to gamers than the extra processing power and UMA memory architecture, still MSFT would have marketing bullet point against Sony.
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All accounts point to ESRAM coming before 8GB. They were originally going with ESRAM and 4GB of DDR3. I would assume the reason is they projected ESRAM would be the most affordable route to high bandwidth at launch. Sony appears to have lucked out in projecting differently (and it is luck). Both systems appear to be unit sale profitable. Which one is more profitable, and how that changes over the course of gen is another prediction. In terms of overall profits from hardware, that'll depend, because you can go for margins or volume. Sony will come out ahead this gen in terms of sales of software. Not sure who would lead in other content.
Anyway, getting way off topic, but the basic point is that these companies had to project technology and pricing for components years in advance. Those predictions would affect decisions for memory, and by extension embedded RAM.
Anyway, getting way off topic, but the basic point is that these companies had to project technology and pricing for components years in advance. Those predictions would affect decisions for memory, and by extension embedded RAM.
I did wonder what the difference (power & cost) is between DDR3-2133 and say... GDDR5 @ 3.2-3.6GHz.
i.e. 32MB @ 109GB/s + GDDR5 @ 96-128GB/s setup
I think I recall some site doing a breakdown and the price difference is about $40 dollars more to switch over to DDR5.
Should be 32mb @ 204/192/176 though no?
Different speed grades/bins, different cost (and volume).
huh? Just go with the guaranteed bandwidth number. No need for the fudgcicle number game.
DDR3-2133 is the most expensive DDR3 currently in production, it's a niche.
GDDR5 at 5.5 is the lowest cost GDDR5 and almost all the production is usable.
As far as I'm concerned that pretty much explains why the cost estimates are counter-intuitive.
If MS switch to DDR4, they will be at the lowest speed bin, that alone might reduce the cost. It could very well be why they went with DDR3, because DDR4 wasn't ready on time.
GDDR5 at 5.5 is the lowest cost GDDR5 and almost all the production is usable.
As far as I'm concerned that pretty much explains why the cost estimates are counter-intuitive.
If MS switch to DDR4, they will be at the lowest speed bin, that alone might reduce the cost. It could very well be why they went with DDR3, because DDR4 wasn't ready on time.
How is the 6Gbps bin cheaper than say... the 4Gbps grade
What do you mean by all the production being usable?I haven't seen a definitive comparison, and there's usually only relative numbers given by module manufacturers between technologies, and that doesn't take into account the memory controllers using them.
This comparison is a bit dated, but it gives the general fraction of power consumption for an AMD card with an aggregate 512-bit 5.0Gbps GDDR5 bus.
http://www.cse.psu.edu/~juz138/files/islped209-zhao.pdf
I'm not willing to make a real comparison with the PS4 because of the slighly faster console bus and quite a few years of improvements and node transitions.
However, 37% of 375W TDP, cut in half is 70W.
Durango's DDR3 bus is the same width, but the interface is clocked at less than half the speed of the GDDR5 one. The memory controller (edit: parts of it) and significant portions of the interface would be able to cut power linearly, assuming equal voltages.
Tens of watts of power saved seems like it could be possible.
Except the modules being used by PS4 are higher density which is not too commonplace for GPU's right now.
Why not use GDDR5 and DDR3?
If I follow hynix, at 1.5V the lowest bin is 5.0gbps, it's the exact same bin for 4.0gbps at 1.35v, just a choice of voltage. Sorry I edited my post to say "almost" because I forgot they were using 6.0 parts at 5.5. So if they would have used 5.0, they could get everything that comes out without being dependent on the volume demand of lower speed bins.How is the 6Gbps bin cheaper than say... the 4Gbps grade
The other speeds (3.2, 3.6) were GDDR5M, and they have now disappeared from hynix databook (as of Q2/2014). That could have been a much lower cost? I wonder who cancelled their plans for GDDR5M (amd?), maybe it'll never exist.