PS5 Refresh: Oberon Plus

My guess? Less than the number of finger I have.

I'm an outlier: I thought it was a re-implementation of Adobe Photoshop 5 using Oberon programming language.

(Tidbit: Photoshop was first written in Pascal, the ancestor of Oberon)

Yeah this article turned out not to be Wirthwhile

They are already. Commercial foundries operate lines that use decades old technology. GF has a .6 micron line that uses 200mm wafers for example.

> Of course, an array of non-cached, non-optimized but very simple and low power processors in a grid can do a lot more work than a single instruction-reordering monster trying to make a single thread go ever faster.

True if you look at theoretical best cases. Not always true on real problems, and it's not always the fault of the programmer if the problem can not be written to suit the flock of chickens processor. Limiting factors are latencies and communication overhead between various dependencies, which is the case whether you expose that to the programmer with your grid, or try to deal with in in the core with multiple execution units and reordering.

It is going to be a sad day in Electronland.

There are older things named Oberon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon

Cost of living increases primarily affect day-to-day spending while a PS5 is a luxury purchase.

If you can’t afford it at the new price, it probably wouldn’t have been a wise purchase at the original price.

Sony is a business. Their costs have gone up markedly and when the hardware is already subsidised, it’s unrealistic to not expect increased costs to be passed on.

Sony will have already factored in the cost saving over the entire lifespan of the product.

I recall that the original Playstation 3 was a massive loss leader. Despite being hugely expensive it was pretty much the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market at the time. They were able to sell it at a loss because gaining a foothold was critical to selling it for a profit later on and the projected savings would let them recoup their losses.

If cost of living and inflation weren't crazy right now across the world then I'm sure we'd be looking at a price drop on the Playstation 5 right now as that's where their projected margins would leave them. But factoring in both the cost savings and inflation means they still need a price rise just to keep on track.

I mean, it's a readjustment to local currency values - otherwise they're selling the PS5 for 20% less in EU markets than in US markets. At some point it becomes worth it to buy a container of hardware and turn it around and sell it in the US as "grey market" and that's value that Sony wants to capture for themselves.

Even allowing software to be sold at different prices in different countries already has far more financial ramifications than people expect - the grey market seriously impacts the profitability of sales in high-earning countries, and it fosters a whole black-market of cdkeys that are purchased using stolen cards/etc and used for money laundering. But with hardware it is a very straightforward "this costs $X to R&D and $Y to build and we're not going to sell it to you for 20% less than everyone else", you're seeing the grey market die out even in traditional strongholds like cameras.

Also, PS5 is a console designed around hardware profitability. They reached profitability around 6-9 months after launch and they don't want to go backward. Everyone finally said enough is enough after PS3 losing hundreds of dollars per console, and the PS4 and XB1 are much more conservative designs with integrated hardware to cut costs, and they reached profitability fairly quickly. PS5 succeeds this and Sony absolutely does not want to go back to the "loss-leader hardware" model.

Prices are sticky, companies don't always want to adjust them every time $FXE has a bad week, but... Sony isn't interested in selling to multiple major markets at a discount that pushes their hardware into the "subsidized" territory. And they've been down for a while now. For everyone else, their cost-reduction in the console itself has been sufficient to hold the price down, but you don't get a discount like you normally would a couple years into the lifecycle. But for the markets where there have been big currency depreciations on top... they are adjusting it.

> It's crazy

It took me 18 months for the chance to buy one from Sony Direct. It'd be crazy for Sony not to adjust prices when demand is through the roof.

If they're selling out everywhere still, after years, I guess it makes sense to try especially with costs rising. Their subscription model is way less mature than Xbox's as well so they need to rely less on that to turn a profit.

You can't make a 'slim' model as easily with these minor efficiency improvements.

Sometimes they drop ports or backward compatibility though.

They update internals many times without changing the case design generally. The reason is cost reduction. Smaller dies mean more dies per wafer. Thermal reduction implies you can get away with a less beefy power supply and thermal management solution, etc.

That's because this isn't a new slim model, just a minor internal revision. These never got big fanfare. There's like 10 different PS2 revisions for example and a similar number of PS3 revisions. Highlighting that you removed a handful of LEDs to save 43 cents on each unit isn't usually done. Occasionally there is a bigish difference like the original PS2s having their PCMIA slot replaced with a HDD slot or the slimline PS2 getting an integrated power supply near the end but often it wasn't visible unless you opened the unit and compared.

The only time I remember people seriously caring was for the 360 where every new revision was speculated to be the fix for RROD.

It's probably just too early in the product lifecycle for a slim model. The PS4 just barely eaked one out at the 2 year mark because the XBone and PS4 were pretty dated hardware when they released, the PS3 took 3 years, PS2 took 5 years The slim "PS One" took 6 years.

Capacity for die shrinks is probably a bit tight at the moment given the chip shortages and the fact that Apple are basically buying all TSMC production capacity on stuff that's vaguely new. The 6nm process they've just picked up for the PS5 refresh was coming online when the PS5 was first released. I imagine we'll see a true slim when Sony / AMD are able to get enough capacity on the 5nm or 4nm process.

Based on location or availability?

That is nothing more than a meme at this point - at least here in UK they have been in stock for months and it's not an issue to buy one whatsoever.

I was able to buy one from WalMart's site last month (fulfilled by a third party). They appear to still be available.

With far more die per wafer, it should help with that problem.

Contribute to the different volunteer computing projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...

How well did the economics of this kind of an operation end up working out? Seems like these were a fairly recent development, so they really wouldn't have had much time, say, the 500 days cited to reach profitability.

It would be interesting to see how the GPU driver side of this works. If they boot Ubuntu, what kind of GPU driver is required to run the GPU? Is it open source amdgpu compatible?

In any case, these would work rather well for some kind of VPS server hosting or maybe more like dedicated server hosting, given the density/form factor. That is assuming the driver situation doesn't preclude a choice of operating system...

stable diffusion hosting

N6 has the exact same design rules as N7 which means a die shrink is about as relatively close to trivial as it gets when it comes to dropping a half-node.

Would N5 ever be cheaper than N6?

"did anybody even buy the second-best selling stationary game console ever", really?

You should look up the concept of bubbles.

Because you are in a serious bubble if you aren’t just being facetious.

Or was this one of those ‘I don’t even have a tv’ weird flexes.