Xbox Business Update Podcast | Xbox Everywhere Direction Discussion

[Charlietus]

I'd hope they don't increase storage or amount of GDDR memory next gen to reduce costs.

1 terabyte of nand is enough, just add 4gb of DDR5 for the OS to free up GDDR7 for games.
Right now games on PS5 have 12.5 gb of memory for games, and around 10 gb as graphics memory. Adding DDR5 would increase that to 16 for games and around 13 for graphics.

Textures are fine right now, cyberpunk runs with path tracing on a 8gb GPU, I hope they don't waste BOM on 32gb. At most, 24 would be good.

Edit: on Dram exchange, on Dram contract price, 4gb of ddr4 is 1,4 dollars. It would be pretty cheap.

 

[Cappuccino]

I'd hope they don't increase storage or amount of GDDR memory next gen to reduce costs.

1 terabyte of nand is enough, just add 4gb of DDR5 for the OS to free up GDDR7 for games.
Right now games on PS5 have 12.5 gb of memory for games, and around 10 gb as graphics memory. Adding DDR5 would increase that to 16 for games and around 13 for graphics.

Textures are fine right now, cyberpunk runs with path tracing on a 8gb GPU, I hope they don't waste BOM on 32gb. At most, 24 would be good.

Cyberpunk textures are pretty awful to accommodate fitting a raytraced presentation in an 8GB buffer.

 

[Charlietus]

Cyberpunk textures are pretty awful to accommodate fitting a raytraced presentation in an 8GB buffer.

Across most games, texture quality is pretty good, it's not really the bottleneck in visuals that it was years ago. Even the best PS4 games have really good textures.

Cyberpunk, even on medium textures, doesn't really have "awful" textures, honestly (aside from some spots like the landfill).

 

[rntongo]

I don't see consoles getting 32gb. Maybe if we get pro consoles at launch for 800€/$.

I think Sony's decision to price at $699 has misled a lot of people. They are making a handsome profit on the PS5 pro at $699. They could have priced it at $499 for a 1TB model. But $699(250 extra) for a newer GPU processor and an extra GB of storage seems a bit steep to me. The cost of memory and storage have plummeted significantly and its not like they got a whole new CPU as well. They're still using a CPU from 2020. I think Sony is going to have a higher profit margin on the PS5 pro than it did on the PS4 pro with current prices. But in response to you, 32GB of storage on next gen wont be an issue at all. Current gen consoles memory costs are not prohibitive at all they are paying in the $50 area for 16GB of GDDR6.

Memory Costs have plummeted

And have continued to fall

If we follow this regression, DRAM prices drop by 5% YoY.
So to keep the same prices today but to double the DRAM would require the following:
Basically inverse principal interest, or rather principal decay formula:

It will take approximately 13.5 years for $100 to decrease to $50 with a 5% annual reduction.
That's when they can keep the same price point but double the memory to 32GB.

This generation released in 2020, so we are looking at 2033/34 approximately to get to 32GB of memory if we want to hold the 499 price point.

Flash storage however will gain double the storage every 3 years for the same price point. The 2TB is overpriced today in theory. By 5 years it should be 1/4 the price we paid in 2020. And 8.8 years to be 1/10th the amount we paid, so by next gen (2028) flash memory could be nearly 10x greater with the same amount of $ used on storage today.

We can probably leverage the savings in the storage to help increase the DRAM pool here by next gen.
So assume next generation is 2028.
DRAM prices will be down 34% from 2020.
Storage prices are down 88% from 2020.

It's possible that 32GB is in the cards, but all of those savings would mean the console is stuck at 1TB in 2028.

We haven't accounted for silicon prices and cooling that silicon however.
To double the power of todays consoles (actually double, not double submission) we need to move from 15.4B transistors to 30B transistors approximately, possibly more. If the cost per transistor doesn't come down (lets say it has marginal decreases in cost), you're basically doubling the cost of the chip here.

So we need to ensure some of those storage savings also need to cover the cost of silicon increases, and we haven't yet touched on cooling yet, or the fact that more transistors will naturally require more bandwidth, so having 32GB of DRAM combined with doubling the bandwidth will mean significantly costs, essentially 16 chips of 2GB which is a 512-bit bus.

The issue with your analysis is you're using 2020 projected figures from MS yet current spot prices show they are paying less than $27 for 8GB of GDDR6, thats at most $50 for 16GB of ram on the consoles today. But first, the most expensive part of the current gen consoles besides the processors was the disk storage which has plummeted in price. IIRC correctly it was between $100-$150 for either the Series X or PS5 with the Series X on the cheaper end of the SSD and cost. But the cost of flash storage has plummeted, Sony and MS arent paying anywhere close to $100 for the 1TB of storage that comes with the consoles today. As well the cost of memory has plummeted over the lifetime of the current gen consoles and continues to trend downwards.

Memory Costs have plummeted

And have continued to fall

I dont see 32GB of unified memory as an issue at all for next gen consoles at the start of the gen and definitely not during the lifetime of those systems. If anything it makes the most sense to get as much memory at the start of the gen as possible. And at the millions of chips MS and Sony buy its hard to believe they wont get good deals on this.

 

[Charlietus]

I think Sony's decision to price at $699 has misled a lot of people. They are making a handsome profit on the PS5 pro at $699. They could have priced it at $499 for a 1TB model. But $699(250 extra) for a newer GPU processor and an extra GB of storage seems a bit steep to me. The cost of memory and storage have plummeted significantly and its not like they got a whole new CPU as well. They're still using a CPU from 2020. I think Sony is going to have a higher profit margin on the PS5 pro than it did on the PS4 pro with current prices. But in response to you, 32GB of storage on next gen wont be an issue at all. Current gen consoles memory costs are not prohibitive at all they are paying in the $50 area for 16GB of GDDR6.

Memory Costs have plummeted

And have continued to fall


The issue with your analysis is you're using 2020 projected figures from MS yet current spot prices show they are paying less than $27 for 8GB of GDDR6, thats at most $50 for 16GB of ram on the consoles today. But first, the most expensive part of the current gen consoles besides the processors was the disk storage which has plummeted in price. IIRC correctly it was between $100-$150 for either the Series X or PS5 with the Series X on the cheaper end of the SSD and cost. But the cost of flash storage has plummeted, Sony and MS arent paying anywhere close to $100 for the 1TB of storage that comes with the consoles today. As well the cost of memory has plummeted over the lifetime of the current gen consoles and continues to trend downwards.

Memory Costs have plummeted

And have continued to fall

I dont see 32GB of unified memory as an issue at all for next gen consoles at the start of the gen and definitely not during the lifetime of those systems. If anything it makes the most sense to get as much memory at the start of the gen as possible. And at the millions of chips MS and Sony buy its hard to believe they wont get good deals on this.

They are making a handsome profit on the pro alright, of that I'm sure. Just aren't positive on how much the weak yen influences things.

But even with the nand and memory costs decreasing, they still haven't done a price cut of the base console. So with that, saving the maximum amount on storage and memory to invest everything on the SOC seems like the thing that makes the most sense to me.

 

[rntongo]

They are making a handsome profit on the pro alright, of that I'm sure. Just aren't positive on how much the weak yen influences things.

But even with the nand and memory costs decreasing, they still haven't done a price cut of the base console. So with that, saving the maximum amount on storage and memory to invest everything on the SOC seems like the thing that makes the most sense to me.

I think it has to be a balance as well as consider what developers want. One thing for sure is they will ask for more memory and memory bandwidth especially with more accelerators that are memory bandwidth intensive like RT. Double the memory and the memory bandwidth. Its still far out though, By the time those systems launch GDDR7 will be a bit old.

 

[iroboto]

They are making a handsome profit on the pro alright, of that I'm sure. Just aren't positive on how much the weak yen influences things.

But even with the nand and memory costs decreasing, they still haven't done a price cut of the base console. So with that, saving the maximum amount on storage and memory to invest everything on the SOC seems like the thing that makes the most sense to me.

On the spot pricing is not the same as standard contract pricing.
So this wouldn't apply to the consoles of today.
Its like taking a fixed mortgage versus variable.

You get a better fixed contract rate the longer you go, and you can base your console around those prices. Variable you can catch big drops, but you're in the shitter if the prices skyrocket. I don't think these console manufacturers will ever ride the 'on the spot' pricing, and I'm not sure how strong of a indicator that is for prices paid by manufacturers that need to control costs to the single dollar amount.

I agree that prices are coming down, but that's not reflective yet on the GPU market. We are still seeing high end cards stuck around that 12GB range today. There are loads more factors involved here in getting more VRAM into the system.

 

[rntongo]

On the spot pricing is not the same as standard contract pricing.
So this wouldn't apply to the consoles of today.
Its like taking a fixed mortgage versus variable.

You get a better fixed contract rate the longer you go, and you can base your console around those prices. Variable you can catch big drops, but you're in the shitter if the prices skyrocket. I don't think these console manufacturers will ever ride the 'on the spot' pricing, and I'm not sure how strong of a indicator that is for prices paid by manufacturers that need to control costs to the single dollar amount.

Sony and MS lock in the prices, why go for variable rates and increase uncertainty? You can always renegotiate if prices go well below or above whats set in the contract. I dont buy that they simply go with the flow considering they have to buy these chips in the millions. If anything MS or Sony are getting better deals than we can even find via public sources. It makes sense for chip makers like Micron to lock in stable revenue from console manufacturers

 

[iroboto]

Sony and MS lock in the prices, why go for variable rates and increase uncertainty? You can always renegotiate if prices go well below or above whats set in the contract. I dont buy that they simply go with the flow considering they have to buy these chips in the millions. If anything MS or Sony are getting better deals than we can even find via public sources. It makes sense for chip makers like Micron to lock in stable revenue from console manufacturers

I agree they wouldn't go with variable rates, which is why I'm not sure if the recent 'crash' in memory pricing is what is reflected in the graph provided by MS, which I suspect are the graphs of standard contract pricing with purchasing discounts for large volume.

 

[rntongo]

I agree they wouldn't go with variable rates, which is why I'm not sure if the recent 'crash' in memory pricing is what is reflected in the graph provided by MS, which I suspect are the graphs of standard contract pricing with purchasing discounts for large volume.

Which goes back to them negotiating better deals. There's always a trigger price at which they renegotiate. Either they were getting them at such low prices or they had to renegotiate with Micron for a better deal.

 

[Nisaaru]

Less sales means a higher price to recover the R&D cost for the Pro design. On top of that the old console subsidisation doesn't work anymore so asking higher prices to compensate for the loss is another factor.

So the price hike doesn't really surprise me.

 

[RDGoodla]

Rumor is that there will be 3rd party xb.

It seems MS will produce a APU for home console and another for handheld console, but the frequency depends on 3rd party. Maybe 1.5~1.6 GHz for entry xb and 3.0~3.1 GHz for expensive xb.

 

[QPlayer]

Rumor is that there will be 3rd party xb.

It seems MS will produce a APU for home console and another for handheld console, but the frequency depends on 3rd party. Maybe 1.5~1.6 GHz for entry xb and 3.0~3.1 GHz for expensive xb.

What is the benefit of MS if 3rd party companies sell their console variants with extra profit and are available to customers more expensively?

 

[iroboto]

People just writing whatever they want about Xbox, lol. No one has a clue where we are headed as an industry. It's pretty clear there are issues, and everyone is looking to discover a new way to move forward and the traditional model is struggling to provide sufficient profits. Everyone is on the move, MS is just taking bigger strides in doing so.

I'm seeing a trend of convergence of platforms, but that's about it. It's clear Xbox wants to diversify away from the need of hardware, and move into a space where cloud streaming and localized games on their own storefront are available directly onto mobile phones or mobile devices. The xbox console will stick around for as long as players want it, but they are eyeing various different markets for growth now. How they intend to achieve that is still up in the air, but it does appear that, Series consoles will be around for a while, I'm not expecting a new generation of console anytime soon.

The new mobile phones, if powerful enough to be a substitute for a xbox one level of power, makes a great case for porting many of their titles, in particular their F2P titles like Halo, Gears etc. on their own mobile store front. They have already taken the step to merge xbox app with gamepass, all they need to do is move a storefront into that app and they are complete there to become a single stop gaming application for anyone with a mobile device.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

They have already taken the step to merge xbox app with gamepass, all they need to do is move a storefront into that app and they are complete there to become a single stop gaming application for anyone with a mobile device.

I wonder if Google/Apple's insistence on a cut of sales might preclude that? Much like any videos purchased/rented on Amazon Prime.

The PlayStation store operates as normal on Android though, so maybe not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯