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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?
"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.
Trump. Trump is killing ALL price drops.
Yes but that's only part of it
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.
The lack of price drops aren't really caused by tariffs up to this point.
Tariffs will be responsible for price increases however.
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.
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 !hardware@lemmy.world, 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.