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[prag16]

OP updated:

Revised analysis.

...

Only $15-20 for assembly means assembly in China I'm assuming?

How much is packaging/shipping normally for something like that?

Chipworks thought Wii U's MCM probably cost them around $100. If that's true they got a terrible deal if your APU estimate is correct. Apples and oranges to an extent, but still..

 

[DBT85]

So they're selling it approximately at cost? That is a world of difference from the PS3 launch, good lord.



And/or it's a highly customized and relatively complex cooling setup, akin to the first-gen PS3.

At a guess is going to be a similar blower type system to the first gen slim. Similar size case, similar drive and HDD. Main difference is only cooling one main chip and the ram if it needs it(rather than just a small heading and general airflow doing the trick.

 

[Midas]

I'm surprised that HDMI costs that much.

 

[ScottSullivan]

Is it already confirmed that Sony actually makes a profit on PS+? Let's say Sony would 'normally' make a $10 loss a month per person (for keeping up servers, services, apps, etc.). With PS+ that would only be a $5 loss per month, and than we are just assuming that that full $5 goes straight to Sony, and nothing to developers or publishers (for the 'free' games).

Where are you getting the 10 dollar loss from just from people using Sony's servers? That sounds really high.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

There is zero need for ARM chip to have AV encode/decode modules. Main APU has that covered. If Sony is smart they will place single or dualcore A5/A7 that will only manage I/O and shuffle needed files from the web to the HDD. That will cost them few million transistors max, nothing in a big scheme of things.

BTW, there was report few years ago that DS3 costed Sony $13.

The story we have heard is that Sony wanted to dedicate as many cycles to gaming as possible so took the silicon hit and put dedicated hardware on the mainboard to ensure that the OS features didn't hit gaming performance.

I'm sure over time they will integrate the silicon onto the APU, AMD are actually working with ARM right now to put Coretex onto their regular APUs.

Anyway, that's just what we've heard so we'll have to wait to open up the box in November to finalise it, but we have based the estimates on what we've heard from our industry contacts.

DS4 is much higher quality, has a touchpad in it, and it uses RF rather than Bluetooth which will be more expensive. The only saving is the removal of analogue face buttons, but that is offset by so many increased costs elsewhere. The upper limit also includes NFC which we think they have put in there for future use, but not announced yet.

 

[sono]

I think you said you work in the bank.

Assuming that is the case may I ask what does a banker know about costs of building retail consumer electronics except in the most general of senses ?

If you genuinely have direct access to Sony financials you know you will be fired as this is highly confidential data in that case however I am sure that is not the case,

Will you be reporting suspected costs of other devices

xbone
wii u
Samsung TVs ?

i.e whats your motivation for doing this ?

 

[Garcia]

Ouch, so it's actually even more expensive than I first thought. I hope Sony is ready to take a hit in the beginning and still launch this for 399. Anything more and I'm out.

Oh, but you don't need to worry about poor Sony. By the end of the next generation they will have milked approximately some extra $350 dollars out of your wallet.

You won't be paying just $400 bucks, but an extra $50 a year for online multiplayer, which sets the true price for a full PS4 experience around $750 - $800.

Do you still feel bad for SONY?

 

[DBT85]

DS4 is much higher quality, has a touchpad in it, and it uses RF rather than Bluetooth which will be more expensive. The only saving is the removal of analogue face buttons, but that is offset by so many increased costs elsewhere. The upper limit also includes NFC which we think they have put in there for future use, but not announced yet.

Didn't know the new controllers were RF.

And I did see one impression of the DS4 (might be giantbomb) who said it doesn't creak when you twist it like a DS3 and generally felt better built.

NFC would be nice for sharing videos and stuff.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

I think you said you work in the bank.

Assuming that is the case may I ask what does a banker know about costs of building retail consumer electronics except in the most general of senses ?

If you genuinely have direct access to Sony financials you know you will be fired as this is highly confidential data in that case however I am sure that is not the case,

Will you be reporting suspected costs of other devices

xbone
wii u
Samsung TVs ?

i.e whats your motivation for doing this ?

I'm actually an analyst, and I have quite a large team that works for me. Our clients are, well, interested to know how much the PS4 costs as it will be a very large part of Sony's potential business (and losses) over the next couple of years. Obviously I have anonymised the data so it doesn't get back to me, but I can assure you a lot of banks with investment divisions will be doing the same stuff right now.

We're going to get one done for Xbone pretty soon, and I think we have estimates on Samsung phones, TVs, tablets and a bunch of other products as well.

Again, "banking" is not just sitting on a trading floor shouting.

The motivation to post it here is that I figure people on GAF would find it interesting.

 

[Midas]

I'm actually an analyst, and I have quite a large team that works for me. Our clients are, well, interested to know how much the PS4 costs as it will be a very large part of Sony's potential business (and losses) over the next couple of years. Obviously I have anonymised the data so it doesn't get back to me, but I can assure you a lot of banks with investment divisions will be doing the same stuff right now.

We're going to get one done for Xbone pretty soon, and I think we have estimates on Samsung phones, TVs, tablets and a bunch of other products as well.

Again, "banking" is not just sitting on a trading floor shouting.

The motivation to post it here is that I figure people on GAF would find it interesting.

It's very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

I don't personally work with OEM manufacturers so I have no insight in things like this.

zomgbbqftw, what's your thoughts about the PSU? Do you think they will go with a PSU which can do 110~240v? Or specific ones for Europe and Japan/North America? It feels like putting two different ones in the assembly line will eat up the cost they'll save instead of using one that could handle both. Most chargers and things a like these days seems to work everywhere. See Apple.

 

[tirminyl]

Oh, but you don't need to worry about poor Sony. By the end of the next generation they will have milked approximately some extra $350 dollars out of your wallet.

You won't be paying just $400 bucks, but an extra $50 a year for online multiplayer, which sets the true price for a full PS4 experience around $750 - $800.

Do you still feel bad for SONY?

Sure - if you NEVER utilize any of the discounts that are provided from Plus nor download any of the free games and dlc that are offered....then you can maybe say that is the true ownership costs.

 

[witchedwiz]

The big cost is not the parts but R&D.

Annnnd this post nails it....
Massproducing and whatnot makes usually sure they don't sell it at a loss..
Offsetting r&d cost asap is the priority, it's when net gain starts..

 

[Melchiah]

If they are using a bit more copper than usual it might explain it maybe.

And/or it's a highly customized and relatively complex cooling setup, akin to the first-gen PS3.

IIRC, the launch PS3's cooling setup was somewhat expensive.

Found this pic by googling.

I'm really interested in seeing the innards of the PS4.

 

[Midas]

Annnnd this post nails it....
Massproducing and whatnot makes usually sure they don't sell it at a loss..
Offsetting r&d cost asap is the priority, it's when net gain starts..

Of course, but I can't imagine how low the R&D for PS4 must be compared to PS3. The cost of Cell... Yikes.

 

[Dragon]

IIRC, the launch PS3's cooling setup was somewhat expensive.

Found this pic by googling.

I'm really interested in seeing the innards of the PS4.

Yeah Sony did a great job on initial PS3s. Mine actually died today after almost seven years. So I took it apart to see if I could fix it and man its clean in there.

 

[Iacobellis]

Actually this is strange behavior for Sony. They have never sold it at about the value or small loss, let alone profit. They are usually eager to take a moderate to large loss knowing that they can make it up over the course of the generation.

This is Sony's first major launch (aside from Vita) since they have fallen in the industry. Prior to the PS3 launch, they were still a well-known company in the US. Even more so before the PSP. I can see that they are trying to save all of the money they can and get out of the disaster years they have been in.

 

[RaijinFY]

I would be very interested to know how they plan to reduced PS4 manufacturing costs over time. Especially with the GDDR5 ram. I havent seen the main ram manucfacturers are planning 8Gb module anytime soon?

 

[coldfoot]

27-40 is awfully high for the PSU, so is 33-50 for cooling, those are ridiculous amounts.
Also, motherboards cost money, they have capacitors and other stuff, and PCB's aren't free.

 

[sono]

I'm actually an analyst, and I have quite a large team that works for me. Our clients are, well, interested to know how much the PS4 costs as it will be a very large part of Sony's potential business (and losses) over the next couple of years. Obviously I have anonymised the data so it doesn't get back to me, but I can assure you a lot of banks with investment divisions will be doing the same stuff right now.

We're going to get one done for Xbone pretty soon, and I think we have estimates on Samsung phones, TVs, tablets and a bunch of other products as well.

Again, "banking" is not just sitting on a trading floor shouting.

The motivation to post it here is that I figure people on GAF would find it interesting.

I always check my sources before evaluating data. So an anonymous analyst and his team has already posted revised costings from first to current edition of the post. Do your team often get things wrong and need to correct them?

 

[zomgbbqftw]

27-40 is awfully high for the PSU, so is 33-50 for cooling, those are ridiculous amounts.
Also, motherboards cost money, they have capacitors and other stuff, and PCB's aren't free.

The first two are actually related to the PS4 design which is very, very compact, if Sony are going to make a console that doesn't have issues then they will need higher quality parts.

Also, "other".

 

[Orayn]

27-40 is awfully high for the PSU, so is 33-50 for cooling, those are ridiculous amounts.
Also, motherboards cost money, they have capacitors and other stuff, and PCB's aren't free.

Do you have more accurate insider-ish information to share, or do those prices just seem wrong to you?

 

[DieH@rd]

No, it's been said a lot of times that they have dedicated silicon for the background and OS functions. It is an actual dedicated chip. While at E3 our guy was talking to developers who said that no system resources were dedicated to background functions for the "Share" feature (recording the stream) which is why we have it down as an ARM chip with AV hardware. That raises the cost from just being a dual core A9 ($5-7).

No game system resources. Developers dont need to gimp their game rendering to leave resources for DVR/Remoe play, because OS chunk of APU is handling that [rumored to be 2 jaguar CPU cores, 1-2 gigs of ram and ~5-8% of GPU]. That's why devs are happy. Putting AV resources into ARM doesent make sense when APU has that by default [integral part of Radeon GPU tech].

As for actual dedicated chip part, it really doesent have to be standalone. It could be in APU, or in Southbridge [where it has access to everything it needs, LAN, WiFi & HDD controllers].

I dont know how capable is the default ARM security cpu module that is placed into all AMD products nowdays. They could probably tweak it [beef it up] to serve as both hypervizor and background manager chip.

 

[coldfoot]

No, it's been said a lot of times that they have dedicated silicon for the background and OS functions. It is an actual dedicated chip. While at E3 our guy was talking to developers who said that no system resources were dedicated to background functions for the "Share" feature (recording the stream) which is why we have it down as an ARM chip with AV hardware. That raises the cost from just being a dual core A9 ($5-7).

Embedded ARM chips for encoding video are cheaper than their general purpose CPU's like the A9. The raspberry Pi can do it...

The first two are actually related to the PS4 design which is very, very compact, if Sony are going to make a console that doesn't have issues then they will need higher quality parts.

How many Watts is the power supply in your estimate?
You can get a 90W laptop brick for less than $10 on ebay including shipping. Double it for 180W as the PS4 won't consume any more power than that, and it's still 20, and that's ebay pricing of an external power brick including shipping etc.

 

[Ushae]

Is Sony making a loss on this hardware, or do they have a much lower profit margin? (Stupid question I know, since nobody except Sony execs would know) The price they hit is excellent, but it makes me wonder how they managed it.

 

[Durante]

ARM SoC with AV encode/decode hardware is what we have that down as.

Still seems a bit high. They make complete android SoCs (including CPU, GPU and media hardware) for 6 USD after all.

I like that new GDDR5 estimate is 80-100 USD -- that is what I guessed at when it was revealed (without any insider knowledge).

Cooling also seems a bit high -- very intricate and huge PC tower coolers are sold at retail for that price.

 

[Exokell]

pachter said profit, right?

 

[RoadHazard]

No game system resources. Developers dont need to gimp their game rendering to leave resources for DVR/Remoe play, because OS chunk of APU is handling that [rumored to be 2 jaguar CPU cores, 1-2 gigs of ram and ~5-8% of GPU]. That's why devs are happy. Putting AV resources into ARM doesent make sense when APU has that by default [integral part of Radeon GPU tech].

As for actual dedicated chip part, it really doesent have to be standalone. It could be in APU, or in Southbridge [where it has access to everything it needs, LAN, WiFi & HDD controllers].

I dont know how capable is the default ARM security cpu module that is placed into all AMD products nowdays. They could probably tweak it [beef it up] to serve as both hypervizor and background manager chip.

I'm pretty sure Sony have specifically said that the PS4 has dedicated chips for video encoding/decoding, background downloading and audio processing.

 

[Toki767]

Is Sony making a loss on this hardware, or do they have a much lower profit margin? (Stupid question I know, since nobody except Sony execs would know) The price they hit is excellent, but it makes me wonder how they managed it.

Probably a very negligible loss/profit if someone buys just the system and then an immediate profit for every game and accessory sold after.

 

[Raist]

DS4 and HDD seem a bit high. "Other" seem a bit low.

Overall I think Sony's looking to break even, maybe lose a wee bit, so overall that's probably more or less accurate.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

Embedded ARM chips for encoding video are cheaper than their general purpose CPU's like the A9. The raspberry Pi can do it...

How many Watts is the power supply in your estimate?
You can get a 90W laptop brick for less than $10 on ebay including shipping. Double it for 180W as the PS4 won't consume any more power than that, and it's still 20, and that's ebay pricing of an external power brick including shipping etc.

We think it's an A9 and dedicated AV hardware, we'll find out in November I suppose.

We have it down as a 200W internal PSU, and you can't compare it to eBay pricing either as it will have to fit in a much more confined space and have much, much lower failure rates than regular laptop power bricks because it is integrated. That raises the cost significantly.

Still seems a bit high. They make complete android SoCs (including CPU, GPU and media hardware) for 6 USD after all.

I like that new GDDR5 estimate is 80-100 USD -- that is what I guessed at when it was revealed (without any insider knowledge).

Cooling also seems a bit high -- very intricate and huge PC tower coolers are sold at retail for that price.

Yeah, it could be a bit high, but we've based it on other products we think have similar capabilities, until we get the system it will have to do.

Yeah, the GDDR5 estimate was based on a different manufacturer's estimate, we got in touch with another one and they had different figures.

As for the cooling, again it's because of the restricted space and it will have to be very complex and sophisticated with the side intakes and whatnot.

 

[Melchiah]

Yeah Sony did a great job on initial PS3s. Mine actually died today after almost seven years. So I took it apart to see if I could fix it and man its clean in there.

My 60GB was loud as a hoover from day one, but it did last for almost five years. Hopefully there won't be similar noise issues this time.

 

[coldfoot]

We have it down as a 200W internal PSU, and you can't compare it to eBay pricing either as it will have to fit in a much more confined space and have much, much lower failure rates than regular laptop power bricks because it is integrated. That raises the cost significantly.

iSuppli estimated the original 250W internal PSU of the PS3 slim at $20.35. If you estimated the PSU as 200W, it's supposed to cost lower.

Cooling is also just heatsink/heat pipes + electric motor + plastic fan. No way it's that high. Just because it's custom designed doesn't mean it can't be made cheap.

 

[DieH@rd]

I'm pretty sure Sony have specifically said that the PS4 has dedicated chips for video encoding/decoding, background downloading and audio processing.

All except background downloading are modules inside of the APU, all very small. As for background stuff, that is still unknown [there is a large thread on B3D about it].

 

[uncleniccius]

Zombie, you seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, so how does the heat output of GDDR5 ram compare with that of DDR3?
And how quickly will the cost of GDDR5 ram for Sony drop?
Thanks

 

[DieH@rd]

Zombie, you seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, so how does the heat output of GDDR5 ram compare with that of DDR3?
And how quickly will the cost of GDDR5 ram for Sony drop?
Thanks

GDDR5 is not very hot but its hotter than DDR3, if they have good airflow they could possibly just blow air over them.

 

[Dr. Kitty Muffins]

Forgive me, I haven't read most of the thread:

Has the specs for the hard drive been released? We know its size but that is it.

 

[DieH@rd]

Forgive me, I haven't read most of the thread:

Has the specs for the hard drive been released? We know its size but that is it.

VGleaks article [which was very accurate] showcased SATA2 hdd controller. So, SSD's will not be able to use their full ~550 MB/s potential. Sony will use ordinary 2.5" laptop spinning drives, nothing fancy.

 

[JohnnySasaki86]

Revised analysis.

APU (CPU/GPU) - 65-80
8GB GDDR5 - 80-105
OS Chip (supposedly ARM based) - 10-18
Video encode/decode chip - 0 (included in OS chip, we figure)
Blu-ray drive - 25-35
Hard drive - 30-35
I/O - 9-12
Wireless chip + antenna - 4
HDMI+HDCP - 11-15
Other - 10-30
DS4 - 20-29
Mono headset - 3
Cabling/misc - 3

Total parts/silicon - 272-364

Other costs:

Internal PSU - 27-40
Cooling - 33-50
Assembly - 15-20

Total estimated system cost (no shipping and packaging) - 390-430 (Does not include PS Camera since it is not bundled)

Why do you think Sony can get the APU for that cheap? I mean that is super cheap when you consider this is launch! If I remember correctly iSuppli estimated RSX costed Sony $110-120 at launch, while Cell costed them $80. I would of pegged the whole APU to be around $90-100.

 

[Ashes]

I think they got it confused with the normal apu chip which costs about that much. I think the gpu chip alone in that apu is about $70.

I might not know factory prices, but if a normal apu with a crap, really crappy gpu costs that much, I'd wager, an apu with a 1.8 teraflop gpu would cost way more than that.


I'd also disagree with the $30 ds4 estimate. What in it costs more than $5? Altogether, per unit, maybe $10, $15? But I am talking out of my ass.

 

[Graphics Horse]

and it will have to be very complex and sophisticated with the side intakes and whatnot.

Are they using off the shelf holes or using their own hole factory?

 

[spwolf]

lol, it is hilarious that people are questioning well known analysts that often has insider info, unlike Patcher for instance who barely know's what he is talking about.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

Why do you think Sony can get the APU for that cheap? I mean that is super cheap when you consider this is launch! If I remember correctly iSuppli estimated RSX costed Sony $110-120 at launch, while Cell costed them $80. I would of pegged the whole APU to be around $90-100.

Based on cost of the wafer, yields, estimated die size and AMD's fee.

Cell cost so much because yields were very, very poor (mid twenties is what I looked up recently) and for RSX Sony got ripped off by Nvidia, who hasn't?

 

[zomgbbqftw]

GDDR5 is not very hot but its hotter than DDR3, if they have good airflow they could possibly just blow air over them.

Well we have the GDDR5 down as a low power variant, 1.35v 5.5Gbps, that could have comparable power characteristics to Xbone if they are using the high quality DDR3 that has been quoted around here.

All except background downloading are modules inside of the APU, all very small. As for background stuff, that is still unknown [there is a large thread on B3D about it].

Again, on what basis? Sony have said they have a dedicated chip for it, developers have told us that they are pleased that none of the social features detract from their resources and dedicated silicon isn't really costly. It makes sense to wall off the OS and background functions to a secondary chip behind a hypervisor as it will be more hack resistant.

A thread on B3D means nothing tbh, yes there is a lot of informed opinion, and yes AMD's APUs do include a encode/decode functions, but for now we'll err on the side of caution and price in dedicated silicon, if it turns out they aren't when we get inside the box then it can be eliminated as a cost, or at least reduced to a single core A7 ($3).

One of our guys think that Sony are using a dual core A9 with AV hardware and 256MB stacked RAM and the whole OS runs within those limitations. We obviously chose not to price that in!

 

[prag16]

Based on cost of the wafer, yields, estimated die size and AMD's fee.

Cell cost so much because yields were very, very poor (mid twenties is what I looked up recently) and Sony got ripped off by Nvidia, who hasn't.

How do we know exactly what yields are like with PS4? This APU blows away any other APU AMD has produced to this point.

Put me in the "$65-80 sounds too low" camp, for a 1.8TF GPU that has an octocore CPU on board... Of course, I base that on nothing concrete and am not going to tell you you're wrong as others in this thread are trying to do from their armchairs with regard to various details.

 

[Price Drop]

I would think Sony would be willing to incur a loss of $50 to $100 per unit. It would still be FAR less than the PS3 beast which was $800 to $900 at the time. Plus, the accessories and games have higher margins to pad the hardware a bit.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

How do we know exactly what yields are like with PS4? This APU blows away any other APU AMD has produced to this point.

Put me in the "$65-80 sounds too low" camp, for a 1.8TF GPU that has an octocore CPU on board... Of course, I base that on nothing concrete and am not going to tell you you're wrong as others in this thread are trying to do from their armchairs with regard to various details.

It does and it doesn't. Xbone's APU blows away anything AMD have ever done before, it is much more ambitious and complex.

The yield figure comes from a trusted source in the semi-conductor industry. He has given us good info in the past and the die size figure is our own estimate based on what we have seen elsewhere in AMD's product line up.

 

[coldfoot]

Not buying the cooler/PSU estimates based on the PS3 slim with 65nm RSX/45nm Cell. PS4 costs will be similar in those two aspects. Don't really know about the other costs to comment on them.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

Not buying the cooler/PSU estimates based on the PS3 slim with 65nm RSX/45nm Cell. PS4 will be similar in those two aspects. Other stuff can cost more/less, not really sure.

Was that the iSuppli report?

Yeah, they were wrong. Sony lost a lot more than that on PS3 slim hardware, the figures in 2009 were quite bad for SCE, much worse than losing $40-50 per unit in the US and breaking even in Europe and Japan. $900m loss in the division for the year with a $40m gain from Walkman and profitable PS2 and PSP hardware, as well as console software profits. The losses from PS3 hardware within the division were over $1bn (well over) and the slim accounted for the lion's share of the 13m shipped in the year (~11m). There is absolutley no way that those figures were right.

We might have overestimated, but I don't think so. Also remember that these figures are different to what goes in the report, they are slightly scrambled to protect my own anonymity.

 

[DBT85]

lol, it is hilarious that people are questioning well known analysts that often has insider info, unlike Patcher for instance who barely know's what he is talking about.

I thought that.

IIRC, the launch PS3's cooling setup was somewhat expensive.

Found this pic by googling.

I'm really interested in seeing the innards of the PS4.

This is the inside of the PS3 Slim. The PS4 is about the same dimensions so internal layout could be similar. Obviously the drive is on the left now and it looks like the motherboard may be mounted upside down judging from the images of the rear. The black box at the back is the PSU and comes out as one lump.

With only having to cool one chip it should be even better still.

 

[ElFly]

So if Sony can make an AMD APU at that price, I wonder if a massive upgrade on the APU line is coming.

I guess the CPU part may be too weak for regular computing?