Talking about the next PS6 or Xbox consoles is all well and good, but what financial impact could this have on the consumer? Apparently, you have to expect the worst. Explanations.
The next generation of gaming consoles, including the PS6 and Xbox Series 2, sits at a crucial technological and economic crossroads. According to recent observations from a renowned AMD leaker, these future consoles will face a big dilemma. And very clearly, this risks being a big obstacle to purchasing. What is the problem exactly ? This is what we will try to understand together.
The PS6 and Xbox Series 2 at the heart of a problem
In fact, the new and upcoming consoles (PS6 or Xbox) will either have to offer increasingly modest performance gains to maintain reasonable costs, or opt for a significant increase in their selling prices. This situation mainly arises from the evolution of the costs of components and underlying technologies, as revealed by leaker Kepler on Twitter. Known for his precise analyzes on AMD, but not only.
Indeed, the cost per transistor, which remained stable during the FinFETs era, is expected to increase with the transition to GAAFETs/CFETs technologies. Don’t worry, we’ll come back to these terminologies. This trend potentially marks the end of savings achieved simply by reducing chip size. As a result, console makers, such as Sony and Microsoft, face a difficult choice: raise the prices of their consoles or moderate expectations for performance gains from one generation to the next.
What does that mean ? Cost per transistor is a key economic indicator in semiconductor manufacturing. It reflects the cost of producing a single transistor on an electronic chip. Historically, this cost has decreased with each new generation of chip manufacturing technology, enabling performance gains at lower cost. However, this trend is reversing as miniaturization reaches physical and technological limits.
What does it mean ?
FinFET stands for Fin Field-Effect Transistor. This technology represents an evolution in transistor design. FinFETs have enabled significant improvements in performance and power efficiency over traditional flat transistors, while keeping the cost per transistor relatively stable. The terms GAAFETs (Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistors) and CFETs (Complementary FETs) refer to emerging transistor technologies that aim to push miniaturization and energy efficiency even further than FinFETs.
The transition to GAAFETs and CFETs represents a major technological advance, but it is accompanied by an increase in production costs. Manufacturing challenges and research and development investments for these new and complex technologies are driving the cost per transistor higher. For console makers like Sony and Microsoft, this means that future consoles like the PS6 and next-gen Xbox could see their production costs increase significantly. This could mean higher selling prices for consumers or more modest performance gains if manufacturers choose to contain costs.
For now, according to available information, Microsoft is considering launching its next console in two versions, one of which would be a portable version, naturally less powerful than the main model. Sony, for its part, seems to aim to make its PS6 the most powerful console of its generation. This ambition raises questions about the pricing strategy that Sony will adopt. Necessarily…