NEXT GEN Gaming Console, PS5 and Xbox Series X news/upates

I wouldn't necessarily use the pre-orders as an indication (good or bad). They did seem to go quickly, but it is hard to know exactly how many were sold or how many were allocated. It might have been a small early allotment, just to gauge interest in certain things. From what I understand, they're releasing some more consoles for pre-order this week, so it didn't seem like the entire launch stock went up for pre-order all at once. PS5 demand has also been pretty high, based on social media, and pre-orders going live shortly after a positive showing likely lead to more pre-orders than usual.

As for the the reports themselves, I'm not really sure what to believe. AFAIK companies (like Sony) usually don't bother responding to rumors like this, but they seemed to quickly deny it (probably due to stock hit?). I'd think if there were major issues, they wouldn't have pushed to have a global launch at the price points they announced recently. But on the other hand, the source of the reports (Takashi Mochizuki from Bloomberg) is usually pretty spot-on. To be fair, he reported that Sony increased production targets a short while ago, so perhaps these SoC issues are causing issues with those plans. But since Sony never went public with those initial plans, they can truthfully say this isn't affecting their released targets/expectations. So maybe there is some truth to it, but not to the degree that it impacts the shipments that much. Even if they miss out on hitting 10M by end of 2020 and ~15M by end of FY, they can still hit numbers that surpass the PS4. XSX production seems OK too, and given how similar their SoC designs are, I'd be a bit surprised if one was struggling mightily while the other was doing just fine.

If I had to guess, I'd say the problems are probably overblown. I'm sure it isn't perfect, but I'm guessing it is more or less in line with what Sony/AMD expected based on what they forecasted at the start of production.

edit: Also, in comparison, the PS3 *did* have major production/supply issues involving blue laser diodes. That seemed easier to confirm and expect relative to the issues mentioned for the PS5.

 

This is from the Hot Chips presentation this year. "Higher wafer price AND lower yield => higher SOC die cost". The Sony rumor was based on low yields (I think the rumor was 50% or something like that, which would be abysmal). There's probably some true to it if Microsoft is experiencing a similar issue.

 

When will the next wave of pre-orders hit??? I tried doing it at freakin 11:30 AM and was sold out already smh

 

Yeah, to be clear, I think both SoC are probably experiencing subpar yields (relative to previous generations), but I'm guessing they were somewhat expected. I'd still think well above 50% though, unless that 50% number was under some special context I/we don't understand (very much possible). I was under the impression you'd want 90% or greater yields, at least eventually (maybe you could settle for 70%-80% temporarily at launch?).

This does bring up a good point about cost cutting with these consoles. I'm not as up to speed on these things as I used to be, but I'm under the impression that we're hitting some limits there. IIRC, the Hot Chips talk referenced also includes a mention about memory prices not falling in price like they did before. That's partially why the RAM increase is relatively small compared to previous generations. SSDs prices will certainly fall, but with RAM and possibly SoC costs being difficult to bring down, the PS5 and XSX will likely take a long time to ever reach those lower price points...if they ever do. I can't remember where I watched/heard this, but this was actually part of the reason MS designed the XSS. It was easier/better to just design a new system that targets sub-$300 price points instead of trying to reduce costs in the XSX to eventually hit it.

I remember the PS2 days where Sony was able to aggressively redesign the chips and components to save money as well as make the thing so tiny. It was very impressive to see the engineering work they did over the years. I assumed this type of work would always be possible (they did something similar with PS1), but sadly no.

 

Yeah, I recently saw a nice diagram showing how the die sizes for the various PlayStation and Xbox consoles shrunk over time. It seems we're at a point where there's very little room for that to occur going forward. I am impressed with how the Xbox Series X is designed (with its split motherboard and single large fan) to keep the box size somewhat compact. The PS5 is so freaking big.

 

@RC Cola thank you for the detailed reply. One theory I've seen is that ps5 higher clock speed targets were the issue, so the chip may still be functional, just not good enough to meet sony spec.

 

This article is claiming a 58% yield rate, with presumably Microsoft and Sony both being affected.

 

Thanks. Yes this was the article that prompted my qns. 102k wafers is a lot. I guess lower yields relative to amd's small chiplets was unavoidable, but 58% is worrying.

 

Microsoft acquires Bethesda Softworks in $7.5B deal

"Microsoft has acquired ZeniMax Media and publisher Bethesda Softworks, the company announced Monday. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, published a letter on Xbox Wire, welcoming the The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Doom, Dishonored, and Quake franchises, as well as Starfield and more, to Microsoft."


I don't play these games, but they're popular franchise. 7.5 b, is also lot of money, the ROI will be interesting. And of course these deals seems to go right past anti-trust regulations.

 

I guess that's possible, but still seems odd to me, unless things went very wrong between planning and execution. If the clock speed caused that much of a problem all by itself, I'd think maybe they could just scale back the clock speed and enable/add more CUs to end up at roughly the same performance. Also, while it is clocked high, I don't think it is super high relative to AMD's other GPUs, so I'd think AMD's designs could handle something like that.

I'm probably just being overly optimistic and giving them too much credit. Just seems like we'd see other signs of supply issues than this random yield rumor. FWIW, people are trying to use Amazon bestseller stats for the recent pre-orders to figure out some things. Like I said earlier, I wouldn't put too much emphasis on that data, but as far as stock goes, I think both systems ended up pretty high in different regional charts in terms of "best sellers for 2020," which I'm assuming means Amazon (in different regions) ended up with a good amount of stock. PS5 in particular seemed to have greater supply relative to XSX. So if yields were closer to 80%-90%, what would we be looking at?

Now that I've said all of that, I'm expecting news from MS and Sony about how only 1M units will be available through 2020 because of bad yields so I can eat crow.

 

Well the PS5 is a lot more slim than the Series X, to be fair. It's basically tall/slim vs less height/fat.



Plus I remember Sony and MS stating they are intentionally going big this gen to not compromise on cooling ability.

 

Don't know about RDNA2 yet, but current gen's highest boost is up to 1980mhz, and that's the top bin. Majority of chips won't bin as high, and get sold as mid ranged cards that boost to 1700mhz. I could see how Sony requiring 2230mhz as the minimum boost posing a challenge. Xbox are also clocked lower.

Good point on the sales numbers. I think 80-90% yield would be around 125+ XSX dies per wafer. 58% is around 88. Problem for AMD is every wafer eaten by a console SOC is 1 less wafer for zen chiplets, where they can get 600-700 chiplets per wafer.

 

Has it been said that there will be another round of preorders?

 

The more I look a the ps5 the more I like it. Especially the disk version laying horizontally.

 

idk if there will be more pre-orders but xbox twitter said there will be more new systems avail on nov 10th. thats launch day right?

 

Play has no limits

 

Yea I was a bit surprised by the backlash, I love the futuristic and clean design, it's a lot more interesting than past consoles.

 

I think it looks like a fine router:

Seriously, I think it and the 2 Xbox systems look fine. I'm not really that picky though.


In other news, it is sounding like there might be another batch of PS5 pre-orders tomorrow. Several retailers (e.g., GameStop) are putting out information for this.

I want to say there might be plans for another XSX/XSS batch, but I might be misremembering details.

Also, Amazon thought the Stadia was a good idea, so they copied it:
https://www.engadget.com/luna-amazon-cloud-gaming-interview-pwa-apple-173948922.html
Yay next-gen game streaming wars! Actually seems a bit better than Stadia I guess, though not really that interesting IMO. I actually took a look at PSNow again today, and it seems better than I remember. Still needs a lot of love to compete with Xbox, but if Sony actually put any effort into it, it would actually be pretty compelling. Fortunately for Xbox, Sony isn't really good at execution of good ideas like this.

 

They really improved the gaming library, but the streaming is unfortunately still horrible (I heard they only have a server in US and Japan or something, so it's a fuzzy and unresponsive mess when streaming here in Europe, even with my gigabit ethernet).

It sucks that there's so many PS3 games in that library but they are all unplayable due to the bad streaming.