According to leaker and industry insider “Kepler_L2”, who specializes in PC technologies, we should be prepared for rising prices for the next generation of consoles in the form of the PS6 and the new Xbox. A development that can be attributed to the fact that the semiconductor industry is slowly reaching its limits when it comes to scaling.
With the PS5 and Xbox Series
Both Sony and Microsoft attributed the price increases of the two consoles by 50 euros each to the challenging development of the global economy and rising production costs. If the leaker and insider “Kepler_L2”, who specializes in PC technologies, has his way, then we shouldn’t expect that we are dealing with a one-off development here.
Quite the opposite: According to “Kepler_L2”, the successors to the PS5 and Xbox Series X are likely to be more expensive than many expected. According to the leaker, the days when reducing production size (or “feature size”) automatically leads to cost savings are slowly but surely coming to an end.
“The cost per transistor has remained the same with FinFETs and will increase with GAAFETs/CFETs. The days of free savings from die shrinkage are over. “Things are only going to get worse,” said “Kepler_L2.” “Future consoles will either have smaller and smaller performance increases or significantly higher prices.”
The semiconductor industry is reaching its technological limits
The “die shrinkage” referred to by the leaker refers to the process of reducing the manufacturing size of semiconductor devices that are housed on a silicon chip. As part of the process described as scaling, the industry has repeatedly succeeded in reducing the size of transistors and the distance between them.
This allowed more transistors to be packed into the same chip space, resulting in higher performance and greater efficiency. In recent decades, this technology has provided massive leaps in performance and cost savings, from which console manufacturers and their customers have also benefited.
However, the semiconductor industry is now reaching technological limits, which make further progress in this area quite expensive. According to leading companies, the same applies to the transition to new transistor technologies such as FinFETs, GAAFETs (Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistors) and CFETs (Complementary FETs).
But the technical limits and economic developments of the last few years are not only noticeable with the PS6 and the successor to the Xbox Series X. As Sony recently admitted, we shouldn't expect the price of the PS5 to drop like previous consoles did.
A development that Sony's COO Hiroki Totoki attributed to the fact that with the PS5 we are essentially dealing with the company's first console where production costs do not decrease over the course of a cycle.
Instead, the prices of semiconductors and production have risen continuously in recent years. According to Totoki, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a profit from selling the PS5 hardware.
Those: Kepler_L2 (X/Twitter)
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