Breaking Down the Dropping Parts Cost for Sony's PS3 302
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."
GPU down from $83.17 to $58.01 (Score:5, Informative)
Because the summary probably won't be fixed.
Summary gets GPU prices wrong (Score:3, Informative)
A new version of Nvidia Corp.'s Reality Synthesizer serves as the graphic processing unit for the game console. The revised version of the part is priced at $58.01, down 30.3 percent from $83.17 previously.
The summary has used the CPU prices as both. Seriously, even if you the submitter made an honest mistake writing it down, surely the editor should've noticed that both figures being the same was suspicious and double-checked? Is it really too much to ask for the slightest bit of editing?
Exchange Rates? (Score:3, Informative)
The article does not mention anything about exchange rates - since the PlayStation is not manufactured in the US and the article mention all amounts in dollars [the Yen strengthened considerably against the Dollar the last year or so] - I would take the amounts with a pinch of salt.
The other possibility of course is that they converted everything from Yen into Dollars - but did not mentioned it.
Re:Unfortunately, not all these changes are good! (Score:3, Informative)
Sony has also removed SACD support from the newer models.
Not a big deal since the overlap of SACD listeners and game players is probably me. But I'm very happy to own a 60 GB model, I just hope that when (not if) it breaks Sony can repair it and I can keep my 99% compatibility and the multi-channel PCM output of my SACDs over HDMI (my old SACD player would only output SACD over the 5.1 analog jacks).
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:4, Informative)
Cooler CPU is a BIG deal (Score:2, Informative)
I have the original 60GB, and I wish I had the new 65nm cell chip - the fan in my PS3 is louder than anything else in the house, we have to crank up the volume to hear movie dialogue over it.
Now, assuming that I did plump out another $400 just to get a quieter box, how much of a pain in the a$$ would it be to transfer all of my downloaded games onto the new unit?
Re:If only Microsoft hadn't cut corners (Score:5, Informative)
Hope that helps.
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:5, Informative)
>Actually I just bought a brand new PS3 from Sony for $250.
I did the same exact thing last year for $299, got the 40GB model. I bought the PS3 mainly for the BluRay player.
I did not WANT a credit card out of the deal (even if it is a Chase card), but I read the fine print:
$100 off a PS3,
NO INTEREST 12 months..
AND no yearly card fee?
I paid off the PS3 early at 10 months, the card is blank, and soon to be canceled. I told others, but no one believed the terms and I know 3 people who paid full price anyways. Wacky..
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:5, Informative)
I bought a Wii the week they came out and I've got 14 game sitting on my shelf. I play what I find fun, not what gets all the buzz. After all, I'm the only one that can truly determine my happiness because if I let others determine it for me, well, they're living my life, I'm not living my own. So yeah, I see the commercials for "HypedGame 7 only on PS360!" and yawn. Big deal. Remember how cool Assassin's Creed was going to be? Or the hype of Heavenly Sword and how that was going to launch the PS3 into the lead for this generation? When was the last time either of those games were even mentioned? I haven't played either and, you know what, I didn't miss them. They were hyped, summarily beaten in hours, and forgotten by the hardcores.
It kinda reminds me of my EverCrack days, where the hardcore guilds would do everything they could to conquer the content as fast as possible, meaning devs were always working on new content to keep the hardcores happy, bugs went unfixed and the less hardcore raiders (not to mention the purely casual gamers) were completely ignored. It got to the point where most of the people playing the game never got to see even half the content in the game all to keep the hardcore junkies hooked and needing a fix.
Taking that back to the broader video game subject, the hardcore gamers are just moving from one big budget game to the next with very few really good games out there... and I think that's exactly the opposite of where we need to be. Yes, contemporary graphics are a good thing, but should as much effort go into rendering a rippled water reflection in a fountain that you're going to spend a half second running by as developers put into making the game actually fun, memorable and replayable? If I want perfect reality, I'll look out my window. I play games to have fun. And that... is what Nintendo is trying to tap into, making gmaes that are fun for a lot of people rather than a 30 second "gee whiz, look at that!" for a few people. And you know what? That's fine by me... which is why I'll stick with my Wii instead of getting caught up in the hype of the next XBox3 game.
Re:Unfortunately, not all these changes are good! (Score:2, Informative)
But at least the harddrive is bigger. That's something, no?
I bought the XB360 recently. Brother went for PS3, basically because of BluRay. I'm repeatedly saying that he'll rue the day he sawed his credit card, and he laughs at me because I only have DVD-capability. Also, he claims, the best games are for PS3.
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I worked on the HD DVD team back then, and we manifestly wanted HD DVD to win, and we invested quite a lot in it. However, we didn't bet the Xbox 360 on it the way Sony bet the PS3 on BD (which appears to have been a good choice from the console business perspective). In the end, Sony was willing pay to whatever cost it took for BD to win.
Our interest was much more in delivering great video experiences than in which particular substrate thickness of polycarbonate imaged with a blue-violet laser won in the end.
This is a sample of what I've been working on these days:
http://smoothhd.com/ [smoothhd.com]
Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.
Re:Sony needs to... (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft developed the codecs used by *both* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Microsoft had no significant interest regarding which format took hold --- in either scenario, the players would be running Microsoft software. Microsoft's only interest was for the format war end quickly.
Oh, the codec side of things was relatively minor. We developed VC-1 and related tools, but have a patent position and a lot of involvement in H.264 as well, and that side of things always supported VC-1 on BD as well.
The bigger effort and team was focused on building the interactive players for the Toshiba and Xbox 360 players. The whole HDi layer was jointly developed by Microsoft and Disney.
As a XML markup + scripting code-behind, it was a lot like a subset of Silverlight, actually.