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Breaking Down the Dropping Parts Cost for Sony's PS3
will_die writes "The people at iSuppli have taken apart an October 2008 version of the PlayStation 3 to create a bill of materials, along with providing a comparison to original PS3. The article provides information about the changes Sony has made. One of the big ones was that the hardware has gone from costing $690.23 to the current price of $448.73. This was done using a combination of removing parts (currently 2,820 vs. the original 4,048), cutting the cost of the CPU ($46.46 vs. $64.40), and cutting the cost of the graphics processor to $58.01 from $83.17."
They wouldn't have had to spend over $1B on repairs and extend the warranty an extra 3 years for the XBox 360. Chances are, the 360 would be cutting a small profit by now. The moral of the story if the successor to the XBox 360 is to trounce Sony, is that they need to not cut corners if they want to exploit Sony's weakness. They'd better learn that because the PS3 is a very, very powerful system and when it hits $300 will be in the range that a lot of gamers will be willing to pay.
I'm all for a cheaper PS3, which apparently can only happen with a bit of "wow" taken out of the box, but for a bit of history:
*The original 20 and 60 GB models of the PS3 supported full hardware backwards compatibility for the PS2 (with the notable exception of the Guitar Hero controllers). The 60GB had a lot of extras, like card slots.
*The 80GB unit without FULL backward compatibility still supports 80% of PS2 titles, and retains the memory card slots.
The way I see it, you shouldn't degrade a tech product over its life cycle, you should add features to it. Or failing that, it should get VERY cheap, and super small.
PS3 isn't doing either. I'm glad I own the 80GB model.
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4-5 more Metal Gear Solid like titles is a lot to ask, but I see your point.
I think the online part is more doable and more important for PS3 to compete. The 360 was better online to begin with, but since the update the PS3 is even further behind now.
It will be interesting to see if the games for PS3 start to really use that extra processing power. I feel that back in the sega nintendo days the first game was usually horrible compared to what developers were able to do after the system had been around a while. Do the new console wars prevent games from getting even close to that peak anymore? and will the PS3 be that next step? or will that take too long and the new Xbox III have better timing?
No. GPLDAN just used the word the wrong way. What he really meant was that while the absolute number of PS3s sold to customers are going up - more people buying than returning - the relative numbers (=market share) goes down, because the competitors keep outselling it.
What I'd like to know is the real install base of the three consoles. You know, not every Xbox360 sold is actually going to a new customer due to a so-called RROD phenomenon. Is there any good data to clear that up?
The semiconductor industry is in dollars so the foundry price of the chips will be in dollars.
Actually I just bought a brand new PS3 from Sony for $250. Sign up for a Sony Rewards card, and you get a new 80 gig PS3 for $250.
Mind you, Microsoft is losing tons of money with RRODs, and I'm not sure they can really afford to sell a 360 for $200, but they're doing it for market share.
My Wii is gathering dust, but Nintendo sells cheap hardware for a profit, and people can't get enough. Maybe they're the ones doing it right.
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The WSJ has the same take on the PS3. It is doomed. I am not so sure. Sony always plays to the big picture, is always, as the say in politics, on script. Sony has a lot of different interest, but what is interesting is that all these interests seem to play together, none of them go off script just because it might mean more profit in the unit. For instance, the MP3 players did not sweep the market due to the fact that Sony wanted to protect it's content interests and push the memory card standard. Some might call that a mistake, others might have said it would have been a mistake to stab other divisions in the back by doing otherwise.
So what has happened here. MS built a game console with very good games that they could sell relatively cheaply. Now, dollar for dollar it does not do so well as the WII, which it competes at the entry price level, is still selling more that the XBox. Wii sales doubled, Xbox relatively flat. To be clear, Wii sold twice as many units as XBox, and given street prices, many paid more for the Wii. OTOH, XBox games seems to be selling more. To make it cheap it did not include a big HD or a dvd drive. In effect, MS gave up the living room to save game console. But is likely not to even have the lions share of the game console market.
Sony used an integrated strategy. The built a more expensive console, but made it a complete unit, with blu ray. I think that many would agree that the blu ray decision was a factor in blu ray winning the format wars, and that this has long term strategic significance to Sony, most specifically in keeping the living room away from MS, who bet on HD DVD.
So Xbox likely has fewer consoles out there than Wii. Both are primed for streaming media, and not all XBox 360 are capable of playing stored movies, or at least not a lot of them. The PS3 is half in number, but each one is ready to play a new, expensive, and sometimes Sony generated blu ray disc. I think MS continues on it's way to win the battle but lose the war.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's good at doing anything where there's a streaming data
When we discussed the Cell processor in my super computing class, the verdict was it required streaming data to be fully utilized since each of the SPUs each had too little cache.
Perhaps it would have been wiser to instead only have 3 SPUs (+1 PPU) with a little more power and caching each instead of the 7 SPUs. As it stands, it is a problem that is stumping many PhDs.
>I think that many would agree that the blu ray decision was a factor in blu ray winning the format wars, and that this has long term strategic significance to Sony, most specifically in keeping the living room away from MS, who bet on HD DVD.
As far as Microsoft's bet... Microsoft didn't bet anything_ on HD-DVD:
1) They just offered an add-on player and let their fanboys bet THEIR money on HD-DVD.
2) They threw a hundred mil or so at Toshiba. Toshiba lost a LOT of standing with consumers.
Toshiba's reputation sucks now... ask folks who bought last year's Walmart Toshiba HD-DVD players and all the movies they could. Funny how this debacle does not touch Microsoft any.
I don't think Microsoft wanted either format to gain critical mass - wide and early adoption is a threat to Microsoft's goal of 'services', including pay per view and digital downloads. Microsoft set HD video back by a year, that's all they got and that's all they wanted.
Sony has virtually ALWAYS sold their consoles at a loss though. They're selling PS3 at a loss now, and they sold PS2 at a loss for most of the first part of it's lifespan. Selling the system at a loss and making that back up through game sales is nothing new, and has been pretty standard fare for Sony and MS for a while now.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The trick isn't to use each SPU. The trick is to fully use the SPU and not have it waiting for memory look-ups or core-to-core communication.