We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
OG Xbox - nVidia GPU - never gets a price cut and is discontinued almost immediately after 360 releases (with an AMD GPU from which MS never looked back at nVidia)
PS3 - nVidia GPU - Only got small price cuts very late, discontinued almost immediately after PS4 release (with an AMD GPU from which Sony never looked back at nVidia)
Switch - nVidia SoC - never got a real price cut either (though Switch2 is also an nVidia SoC)
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
The PS5’s price is higher than it was 4.5 years ago at launch, a device with identical function. While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price, we see a pro version at 50% more. Crazy.
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.
We continue to be able to make faster chips, both via smaller nodes, but also via advanced packaging and architecture improvements.
But the costs of every new generational increase is rising faster than the % performance improvement.
I am personally hoping this will eventually lead to a culture of total optimization (similar to what we saw in the 90s on both PC and console), but there are likely significant barriers to implementing such a new development culture at scale.
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
There is a lot of content on semiconductor manufacturing (both in context of gaming and beyond) on [email protected], in one way or another anything related to semiconductors does impact both PC and console gaming (since CPUs and GPUs are key).
The console market ever since the PS3 and xbox 360 has been a leech on the PC platform market. They turn up every X years apart to buy a cheap GPU and CPU on a chip and demand rock bottom prices for volume and pay for none of the research and development in the intervening years.
I respectfully disagree. AMD basically said that they survived the Bulldozer debacle because of Sony and Microsoft ordering their APUs. The custom designs also have trickled down with AMD making iGPU that are desktop levels now (8060S).
But that’s what they’ve always done. The NES used a 6502 processor that no one used anymore, and the Sega a Z80 after CP/M went the way of dinosaurs.
The Xbox and PS2 used out of date Pentium processors.
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Trump. Trump is killing ALL price drops.
They mention his tariffs, but it’s also a bigger issue that has to do with the laws of physics hitting economics.
We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
The lack of price drops aren’t really caused by tariffs up to this point.
Tariffs will be responsible for price increases however.
This was going to happen whether Trump became president or not, because Trump isn’t the problem causing this, it is a way simpler problem: greed.
Trump is the cause of it, just last term.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
Trump caused the chip shortage.
But prices are being raised worldwide, not just in the US.
Yes but that’s only part of it
Lol. They show the Switch here… Those greedy assholes never lower the price of that console. Fuck Nintendo.
It’s almost like it’s a running theme…
OG Xbox - nVidia GPU - never gets a price cut and is discontinued almost immediately after 360 releases (with an AMD GPU from which MS never looked back at nVidia)
PS3 - nVidia GPU - Only got small price cuts very late, discontinued almost immediately after PS4 release (with an AMD GPU from which Sony never looked back at nVidia)
Switch - nVidia SoC - never got a real price cut either (though Switch2 is also an nVidia SoC)
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
The PS5’s price is higher than it was 4.5 years ago at launch, a device with identical function. While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price, we see a pro version at 50% more. Crazy.
Lite @ 30%? I dont remember that happening?
They mean 30% less
PS4 MSRP @399 PS4 Slim MSRP @299
XBOX One @499 XBOX One S @299-399
Read that again
“While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price”…? What am I missing?
It’s never happened. No idea what that fella is smoking
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.
Exactly this.
We continue to be able to make faster chips, both via smaller nodes, but also via advanced packaging and architecture improvements.
But the costs of every new generational increase is rising faster than the % performance improvement.
I am personally hoping this will eventually lead to a culture of total optimization (similar to what we saw in the 90s on both PC and console), but there are likely significant barriers to implementing such a new development culture at scale.
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
Really interesting article! I love reading about manufacturing processes and the business side of gaming.
There is a lot of content on semiconductor manufacturing (both in context of gaming and beyond) on [email protected], in one way or another anything related to semiconductors does impact both PC and console gaming (since CPUs and GPUs are key).
The console market ever since the PS3 and xbox 360 has been a leech on the PC platform market. They turn up every X years apart to buy a cheap GPU and CPU on a chip and demand rock bottom prices for volume and pay for none of the research and development in the intervening years.
I respectfully disagree. AMD basically said that they survived the Bulldozer debacle because of Sony and Microsoft ordering their APUs. The custom designs also have trickled down with AMD making iGPU that are desktop levels now (8060S).
If not for consoles, AMD would have likely gone bankrupt or become a marginal player.
Considering what’s happening with Intel in the past ~7 year, it would have been game over for x86 PC gaming on the CPU front.
But that’s what they’ve always done. The NES used a 6502 processor that no one used anymore, and the Sega a Z80 after CP/M went the way of dinosaurs. The Xbox and PS2 used out of date Pentium processors.
the PS2 didn’t use Pentium processors at all