A recent report from Bloomberg has attracted a lot of headlines – the suggestion is that Sony is struggling to control construction costs for the PlayStation 5 and that the $399 pricing sweet spot enjoyed by both PS4 and PS4 Pro may be out of reach for the next-gen system. Bloomberg says that the current cost for building the machine is around $450, suggesting that a retail price of at least $470 is likely – but is the analysis accurate? Will the next generation consoles be more expensive at launch than their current-gen equivalents?
Pricing of console hardware has been a topic we’ve raised in the past on Digital Foundry because the fact is that the economics surrounding consumer electronics have been growing increasingly challenging for console manufacturers in recent years, while the pace of technological innovation has also slowed down significantly.
I genuinely believe that next-gen console hardware from both Sony and Microsoft will be superb – but inevitably, delivering a proper generational leap comes at a price. Solid state storage is a game-changer, we’ll have a desktop-class high performance CPU component this time and while it can’t hope to match the 8x increase in capacity we saw last-gen, 16GB of GDDR6 looks likely. In terms of graphics power, the arrival of the enhanced consoles – PS4 Pro and Xbox One X – has muddied the waters somewhat in terms of defining what a generational leap actually is, but I’d still suggest we’ll get there.
Let’s put it this way. In 2013, PlayStation 4 was the most powerful console on the market, with 1.84 teraflops of GPU compute power. If the December 2019 AMD testing leak proves accurate, PS5’s 9.2TF amounts to a 5x increase in performance, even before we factor in the Navi architecture’s inherent improvements. It’s a proper generational leap, but with Pro and X on the scene, it’s from that users now expect that huge leap in performance. And it’s not helped by the fact that the standard 1080p resolution from 2013 has now increased four-fold to 4K in 2020.
The cost pressures on next-gen come from all directions. First of all, the main processor – the system on chip – is fabricated on a 7nm process, and while the crucial ‘cost per transistor’ is much lower, cost in terms of actual silicon area is a lot higher, based on this information at least, which suggests that a processor with the same area costs 66 per cent more than the 16nmFF process used by PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. We can only guess at the size of the PS5’s chip, but Microsoft is showing off an Xbox Series X chip that looks bigger than anything else it’s ever made before – significantly so, if the measurements of myself and others are accurate. However, you’d hope to see volume manufacturing on the scale Sony and Microsoft enjoy to bring about better pricing.