Console hardware: what Sony/MS went with versus what they should have

[Enigmoid]

Did you completely miss my post where I already said they could have used a mobile 780M GPU from NV and an i7 4950HQ on a power efficient mobile Intel board and would have achieved way more performance within their 180W power usage? You keep arguing how no one would use a mobile part but we can safely use a 780M as the upper-bound GPU specs within 100W TDP at that time and 4950HQ as close to upper-bound CPU spec. That's the whole point of using those components as a point of reference.

Of course none of this matters since component cost and availability are major factors in the console budget and forecasted profitability of the console business model over its lifecycle. The conclusion of this thread remains the same -- unless Sony (or any other 3rd party involved) wanted to take a hit on yields, thus unlocking the full 1280 SPs in the GPU and upping the clocks of the CPU to 1.75-1.8Ghz (by allocating an extra $20 towards a beefier heatsink) -- it is impossible to have manufactured a more powerful console than the PS4 when taking into account the console's cost, power usage and form factor. This is not surprising considering professionals at AMD advised Sony on the best component selection -- the people who know more perf/watt, yields, cost and all things CPUs and GPUs than anyone on our forum. The fact that Sony was able to get nearly 7970M's performance and 8GB of GDDR5, along with a built-in PSU, is an outstanding achievement. Sales of 18.5 million in the first year reflect that their engineers/designers/marketers did an A+ job.

Because these consoles have not been overspeced and overpriced, we are likely to see a PS5/XB2 by 2019 instead of 2021 (Xbox 360 2005 --> XB1 2013 = 8 years generation!). For PC gaming long-term and for console gaming I would choose a current at $399 PS4, with PS5 launch by 2019, than a $599 PS4 with 30-40% faster 780M, and PS5 by 2021 due to extra years required to recoup the losses.

Using the parts as a performance guideline is fine, using their prices is not.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Audio and network will not be CPU bottlenecks, a lot of audio is in dedicated hardware, and the video encoding is done in dedicated hardware. None of that is making much use of the CPUs.

Too bad you can't have "Super FX" like h/w upgrades with todays Blu-Rays and digital content anymore. The consoles of the late 80's, early 90's were far more advanced in that respect. Don't even mention an SSD-like experience, ha!

But yeah, you can't upgrade consoles, so why bother with this. Volume and quality/speed? Everybody knows stock, basic... always means a compromise in everything. The actual consumers vote with their wallets, and sales have been good, so no issues here with the actual hardware powering them.

 

[Lepton87]

Given the cost and power constraints PS4 is really impossible to beat even now while IMHO XBOX ONE should have went with GDDR5 without die consuming EDRAM just like PS4. What alternative is there? I think none* If they were willing to increase the power and cost budget they could have go with 3M steamroller at 2.8-3GHz.

I can only think of going with ARM and apple Cyclone+ cores but that would make multi-platform games a pain and there's no way apple would license their cores. Denver cores are IMHO too unpredictable performance-wise.

 

[Qwertilot]

Could probably do something a bit better with Denver/Maxwell now - maxwell is much more power efficient of course and you could probably work round the quirks of Denver if it was a fixed target on a console Some quite reasonable reasons not to as well perhaps.

Stacked memory should at least mean that the EDRAM/GDDR5 stuff isn't required next time round.