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CNN On The $500 PS3
Chris Morris reports in CNN's Game Over column that analysts have pegged the price point for the PS3 at $500. Despite the high price, you're getting a lot of tech for your buck. From the article: "The strongest argument behind the $499 price point is the PS3's inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive. This bleeding edge technology will give Sony significant bragging rights, but it comes at a cost. Pioneer last week at the Consumer Electronics Show unveiled a standalone Blu-Ray player for $1,800. Obviously, Pioneer's earning some profit there - and Sony will almost certainly subsidize the cost of the drives, but you're still looking at an expensive bit of hardware. The PS3 will also feature other pricey items, such as a hard drive, the Cell processor and a new graphics chip from nVidia."
Exactly.
A huge deal was made about how much less the PS2 cost than a standalone DVD player, since at the time the pricing was announced DVD players cost $1000+, but before release day came, DVD player prices were down in the $100-$120 price range (I paid $120 for a Toshiba DVD player 2 months before the PS2 release) because the PS2 anouncement took the premium value away from the standalone players. Those player manufacturers certainly weren't taking a loss on the players at the lower price point, and they didn't get 90% more efficient at building them in a matter of weeks either...
The biggest expense in producing BluRay players is all the electronics to generate an HD signal, and all that stuff is in next-gen consoles anyway. There will be a moderate increase in the cost of the optics and the price of the patent licenses (which sony doesn't have to pay to itself), but other than that it costs essentially the same amount to build a BluRay reader as DVD reader. The manufacturers just want everybody to think it costs so much so they can make a ton of profit selling to early adopters. Sony has played the PR game so well that ever these stupid analysts believe the cost is high, and the analysts that are smart enough to see through it don't get publicity because they aren't saying anything controversial. Publishing a story like that wouldn't generate any ad revenue.
Memory cards will cost $1200. ;)
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
Yes, that sounds like a bargain, but the Cell processor is *not* configured that way.
Cell = 1 PPE (power processor element) + 7 x SPE (synergistic processor element)
This is far from a 8 x PPC CPU, which would certainly be worth $500.
If you want symmetric processing, go ahead and get the XBox 360 (3xPPC), and wait for the mod chip.
On top of that, the processors are highly specialized. Long pipelines, no cache, without out-of-order execution IIRC. The important part being that these are not good generic processors. Remember: (G|M)hz != processing power. If you really want the power of eight high-end processors, there's no shortcuts.
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Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
And if you look at history, pretty much all systems launch at about 400 dollars, adjusted for inflation.
This may sound odd, but Blu-Ray isn't that expensive once manufacturing is set up. Basically if Sony is willing to take a one-time hit to setup the manufacturing lines, and ignore sunk development costs, Blu-Ray shouldn't cost them much more than a standard DVD drive. However, those were costs Sony was planning on eating anyway to get Blu-Ray to be a popular standard, so it is really costing them nothing extra. Of course, Sony also plans to ship the PS3 will ship sans a HDD, which would be an extra 50 or so in material costs to put towards any special Blu-Ray manufacturing. (the article incorrectly claims the PS3 ships with a HDD, unless they know something we don't).
Chip fabs are also a sunk cost: it costs a stupid amount of money to setup a chip plant, but once you do the new ones cost about the same as the old ones. As Sony has been planning on making this chip standard in all of their electronics, that cost can also be counted against all of Sony's product lines once, and as such shouldn't cost the gaming division a bundle.
Sony has the advantage over Microsoft in this case in that they do a lot of consumer electronics manufacturing, and don't need to contract that out... they eat tooling costs once and can churn these things out cheaply. Microsoft has to pay for someone else to manufacture their stuff, and as such has tooling cost and profit added to each and every one of these that gets made for them.
In the article's defense it does say that analysts really don't know, and poses the theory that Sony may be faking everyone out and ship at a much lower price. Again, history has shown that the price will probably be about 400. Irrespective of manufacturing costs, Sony will find a way to make it about the same. Even if it were cheaper, Sony would probably sell it for about the same. That's the nature of console sales. Only Nintendo lowballs, and it doesn't seem to pay off for them anywhere but handhelds, as it destroys the illusion of value.
As a side note, I do wish that people would stop relying upon "analysts," as for the past few years analysts has been synnonymous with idiots. Those who can, do. Those who can't, analyze.
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I hate to rain on anyone's parade BUT ...
For this money youre getting a CPU way better than most chips put into the Dells and Lenovos out there, and a graphics card to envy.
No you're not. You're getting a main CPU that's significantly worse than anything that's been put into a desktop machine for 5 years, plus six coprocessors which are impossible to program and have inadequate RAM bandwidth anyway.
Consoles have become more and more desktop-like, and the PS3 should be compared to high-end desktops.
No it shouldn't. You don't know what you're talking about. High-end desktops have more cache RAM, more main RAM, instruction reordering on the CPU, and MORE PERFORMANCE unless you *happen* to be running a game. You try running your desktop apps on the PS3 and you'll cry after wasting $500 on that heap of junk.
Give me a decent keyboard, mouse, possibly a PCI slot or ability to connect to most common networks, and an OS to work with and I'll call it a desktop.
You'll call it your $500 1998 iMac (with streaming processor that you can't use) because that's the rough performance level. I mean seriously did you see PS2 Linux? Games machines are not good desktop machines.
The CPU however in itself is worth the pricetag. I'm considering getting the PS3, not for gaming at all, but to use as a linux desktop system running on 8 64-bit PPC cores, each of which runs at more than 2GHz.
The Cell does not have eight 64-bit PPU cores. It has a single hyperthreaded core with no instruction reordering that is outperformed by a 1GHz G4, and six non-PPU cores with arcane ISAs, little in the way of compiler support and no direct connection to main RAM (DMA all the way, baby).
The Cell is a POS for anything but games, media encoders and scientific computing, and its performance at scientific computing is a joke since DP operations are not pipelined so each coprocessor runs like a 200MHz Pentium 1.