Bonus Material: Console SoCs and Motherboard Photography (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here with some photography I carried out for the new Pro console project. A key part of the argument in that piece concerns the cost of silicon - the primary consideration in the bill of materials when it comes to constructing a new console. 

In the image above, you get an 'all-in-one' look at the last generation of console silicon. Sony and Microsoft had two nodes to work with: 28nm for launch machines and 16nm FinFET for the mid-gen slim and enhanced models. The next big leap - 7nm - took years to arrive and is used for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.

On the far left, you see the launch 28nm chips - circa 350-360mm2. If you're wondering why the less capable Xbox One SoC was larger than PS4's more capable chip, blame the ESRAM gamble that went horribly wrong. Microsoft wanted 8GB of memory, went down the DDR3 path and sought to mitigate the bandwidth issues with the ESRAM solution - which it saw as an extension of the eDRAM situation on Xbox 360. Sony went with GDDR5, initially with 4GB as the target then reacted to developer concerns and upped it to 8GB later on in pre-production, nullifying the last Xbox One advantage.

Next up, in the centre, there's the cost-reduced versions for the PS4 'Slim' and the Xbox One S. It should be noted that Microsoft added some logic to the One S APU (4K display support, for example) so it's not quite the straight die shrink that Sony delivered with the Slim. The revised Sony processor occupied 60 percent of the area of its predecessor.

On the right, the enhanced consoles: a conservative design from Sony for PS4 Pro, but a relative monster from Microsoft. Not only was the chip relatively huge, but Microsoft dumped ESRAM and mapped it into GDDR5 memory space for compatibility purposes. It's perhaps ironic that in terms of the basic building blocks of the design, Xbox One X has more in common with PS4 than PS4 Pro. The Xbox One X was a brilliant machine, but for the reasons stated in the new Pro consoles video, expect a more Pro-like approach to console design going forward. 

Sony has done a good job on silicon budgets - I'm told that PS5's SoC area is 308mm2 - a huge saving over Series X's 360mm2. Microsoft's silicon investment has yet to really pay off with game-changing performance and combined with a simpler memory interface and fewer memory modules, I'd expect PS5 to be significantly cheaper to build than Series X.

Photography of the last-gen processors was a key part of the story, but I also took the opportunity to shoot the whole board for each console too, plus I added Series S and Series X vs Series S comparisons. You can find all of those shots in the folder below. I have managed to source a PS5 motherboard too, which should be arriving soon!

Downloads: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14ulx5HOBGDF2Hmr16YQCVsfOel6uxpTA?usp=sharing