I'm not sure 100 watts just for the SOC translates to about half of 180 in practice. There is still lots of other stuff to be powered. HDD, Blu Ray, 8GB RAM, various ports (USB, Kinect), Fans, Wi-Fi and other radios. If the SOC is 100 watts I expect the power supply to possibly be specced at something like the original 360 was.
TDP of 7790 is also 85 watts for that matter. So it doesn't seem like 100 is extremely low for that caliber of GPU.
I was not referring to system power. I was thinking more of PS3 and 360 *original* budgets in terms of component cost, die size, die cost, transistor counts, *original* (not shrink) power budgets, etc. (And I looked at PS2 and original Xbox too.)
So I was projecting a certain likely target for CPU + GPU power consumption and die size/transistor count/cost. (A median between the original PS3 and original 360.)
I did not expect either MS or Sony to deviate significantly this generation. (I was expecting similar price targets, perhaps Sony a little lower than PS3 and perhaps MS a little higher or similar.) Once you start with the price target one can make *some* assumptions. Obviously BOM is not selling price but one can only guess-estimate so much.
I think the price and cost of goods sold was pretty close to the estimate. Sony appears to be closer on CPU + GPU power consumption while MS seems to be a fair step lower. At least the 100W seems to be. It is quite a bit lower than original PS3 and a bit lower than original 360.
Anyways, only a few more months to use both and see what both teams came up with and what can be done with both. I still expect both to strongly compete with each other and I still assert that we can't say that much in detail until we really see the "work done" per frame for the 5B versus 3.XB SOC with the first couple years of titles. [I hope and expect both to be strong, and I think that is best for the customers and the industry. I think one strong console is bad for the customers and industry in the same way that only one strong GPU or one strong CPU vendor is.]
I don't think it will be like last generation where one had a big design handicap. [Which made an impact and made dev difficult but in the end didn't make (at all) the sort of differences that the flame wars would seems to suggest.]
This is just one example from the past:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007286/ps3-hardware-slow-broken
Yet if I compare something like Crysis 3 side by side I can't agree at all that one is "broken". My point is that the differences should be *less* this generation. Not saying it made no impact, but much less than the flames suggested and it should be much less this generation. Perhaps quite a bit less.
[Disclaimer: I own each company's products for the last generations and will this gen too, so don't go full fanboy. Just trying to illustrate that strongly blasted differences, if any, might *result* in quite a bit less than the arguments are suggesting. Such as that silly Pitcairn and Bonaire article. Or that Cell is X TFLOPS. Or that PS3 hardware "is broken". Much of that turns out highly inaccurate if you are interested in what can be achieved with the hardware.]
