Xbox One Costs $90 More to Build Than PS4

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Ever wonder why the Xbox One costs $100 more than the PS4? Mystery solved.

But the biggest cost driver inside the Xbox console, said Andrew Rassweiler, the IHS analyst who led the teardown team, is the microprocessor from chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. Like a similar AMD-made chip found inside the PS4, this one is a combination of a CPU and a graphics-processing unit (GPU) that handles gaming graphics. At an estimated cost of $110 — about $10 more than the AMD chip found in the PS4 — it’s the single most expensive component in the system.
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I thought both had similar APUs? I think I'm missing something here...
 
I dont know how accurate this information is, but AMD did not put these custom built apu's out on the open market, they silently bid for contracts between these companies separately. Therefore, the prices may not directly reflect performance or features as well as they would if they were openly available for anybody to buy.
 
Also note, the Kinect cost $75. So while the Xbox One APU cost $10 more, that has very little to do with the cost being $100 more. Kinect absolutely has everything to do with that.
 
Ah, ESRAM & hardware decoders definitely will change the cost. Thanks for the insight.
 
bigdogchris said:
Also note, the Kinect cost $75. So while the Xbox One APU cost $10 more, that has very little to do with the cost being $100 more. Kinect absolutely has everything to do with that.
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Even taking the Kinect out of the box, the Xbox One is still more expensive. DDR3 prices are about as low as they are going to get, whereas the GDDR5 prices still will see cost reductions as time goes by.

I'm really wondering how MS is going to get to any sort of a price parity with their box.

As for the die sizes, the Xbox One die is 363mm2 whereas the PS4 die is 348mm². Both large, the One's is significantly larger.
 
There was some information that came out a week or so ago that said Microsoft already has a redesigned One in production. They may be trying to get down to $399.
 
Most glaze over the fact that Xbox one has FAR better wireless built into it than PS4 plus HDMI in and out.
 
If Microsoft truly has a cheaper revision already in production, they need to change the name of the Day One Edition to the You Got Fucked Edition.
 
Some good information in this thread, especially the price parity comment on DDR3 vs future drops in DDR5. It is remarkable to see the Ones main crippling component is also what drives the price up.
 
HisSvt76 said:
Most glaze over the fact that Xbox one has FAR better wireless built into it than PS4 plus HDMI in and out.
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Seriously, that is your argument?

HDMI in and out..isn't that pretty much what an HDMI switcher does, or a receiver? Unless you have an ancient or really low end home theater setup, none of that is really appealing.
 
Megalith said:
If Microsoft truly has a cheaper revision already in production, they need to change the name of the Day One Edition to the You Got Fucked Edition.
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Cheaper does not mean better, in many console generations the 1st gen product was better, had more hardware, such as the PS3 and would eventually be highly sought after. We will not know till it hits but often the second revision is a pure cost cutting measure with little to no gain for the consumer.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Seriously, that is your argument?

HDMI in and out..isn't that pretty much what an HDMI switcher does, or a receiver? Unless you have an ancient or really low end home theater setup, none of that is really appealing.
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I'm not making an argument. There is no argument to be made here we are taking about cost of production and features. I was pointing out two features one like the 2.4/5ghz with Wi-Fi direct that the Xbox one has.

Not everything has to be so confrontational.
 
HisSvt76 said:
I'm not making an argument. There is no argument to be made here we are taking about cost of production and features. I was pointing out two features one like the 2.4/5ghz with Wi-Fi direct that the Xbox one has.

Not everything has to be so confrontational.
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Neither of those add much to the cost though.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Seriously, that is your argument?

HDMI in and out..isn't that pretty much what an HDMI switcher does, or a receiver? Unless you have an ancient or really low end home theater setup, none of that is really appealing.
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Most people do not have receivers. If most people had receivers TVs would not ship with 50 ports n the back. Most people hook their equipment directly to the TV. For people with a receiver the Xbox One is redundant. But their target market, the masses of the world do not even have room in their entertainment center for a receiver.

When I first saw the xbox one single HDMI in I was shocked but then I thought about it. For most people this makes complete sense. A receiver takes all these various inputs and aggregates them into a single control point, so what are those inputs? DVD, or BR player? Xbox does that so it is redundant, Music? Also xbox does that. Gaming, as well. So from the stand point of the average consumer whom is not an audio or videophile the only common device the xbox cannot replicate is their cable or satellite TV. If you happen to have a receiver in theory you could simply hook the reciver through the xbox one. or you could do it the traditional way and nothing would change for you.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Neither of those add much to the cost though.
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It still adds cost that is the point all the things that add up.

BTW I don't need any fanboy attacks! I own both systems so please save it for an actual fanboy.

I use the HDMI in for my Xbox 360 works great that runs my media center and the Xbox one controls the whole thing with ir. I press one button one my harmony remote and have access to 3 devices kinda nice.

PS4 is going in my other game room once opened on Xmas. (I already tested it set it up made sure it worked)
 
The biggest issue here seems to be that MS made a mistake in their calculation. In their attempt to save money and increase performance they added ESRAM to the chip and this increased the price of the chip so much it nearly offset the difference in cost of just using GDDR5. In addition the increased area limited their thermal tolerance and yield forcing them to sacrifice on speed of the CPU and size of the GPU. Regardless of how this console generation plays out I think that everyone will have learned a lesson here.
 
rudy said:
Most people do not have receivers. If most people had receivers TVs would not ship with 50 ports n the back. Most people hook their equipment directly to the TV. For people with a receiver the Xbox One is redundant. But their target market, the masses of the world do not even have room in their entertainment center for a receiver.

When I first saw the xbox one single HDMI in I was shocked but then I thought about it. For most people this makes complete sense. A receiver takes all these various inputs and aggregates them into a single control point, so what are those inputs? DVD, or BR player? Xbox does that so it is redundant, Music? Also xbox does that. Gaming, as well. So from the stand point of the average consumer whom is not an audio or videophile the only common device the xbox cannot replicate is their cable or satellite TV. If you happen to have a receiver in theory you could simply hook the reciver through the xbox one. or you could do it the traditional way and nothing would change for you.
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The only thing that changed for me was adding the Xbox one it's on the input my 360 was and now the Xbox 360 feeds into Xbox one.

That's in my main media room of which I still run a stand alone bluray player.

Everything runs through my Pioneer VSX-1123K in that room.
 
HisSvt76 said:
Most glaze over the fact that Xbox one has FAR better wireless built into it than PS4 plus HDMI in and out.
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Since the smart thing to do is plug your PS4 in, rather than use wifi, I'm quiet happy Sony dropped dual band wireless and used that savings to give me a better GPU and memory.
 
5ghz wireless also has next to zero wall penetration. Assuming the reason most of the lay persons of the world have wireless is because they have walls to get through and so did not run a hard wired line I thin that 5ghz will not provide very tangible benefits to most. Great that MS included it, but not if it was at the expense of other things.

That said I do not think that the wireless or the HDMI had anything at all to do with the decision to reduce the APU, I believe that decision can 100% be blamed on the ESRAM.
 
rudy said:
The biggest issue here seems to be that MS made a mistake in their calculation. In their attempt to save money and increase performance they added ESRAM to the chip and this increased the price of the chip so much it nearly offset the difference in cost of just using GDDR5. In addition the increased area limited their thermal tolerance and yield forcing them to sacrifice on speed of the CPU and size of the GPU. Regardless of how this console generation plays out I think that everyone will have learned a lesson here.
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None of that is correct.

Microsoft went with DDR3, because they wanted to have 8GB. At the time the systems were being planned out, Sony was going to go with 4GB of GDDR5 since at the time only there werent big enough ICs for 8GB. Microsoft didnt want to risk the larger ICs not coming out in time. Thats why they have DDR3.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-complete-xbox-one-interview

The CPU runs at a higher clock speed then the PS4s does as well. The GPU has less CUs, but even Sony admits they are bottlenecked with 18CUs, and scaling dropped after 14. The clock speed increase on Xbox One made more of an impact then going with 14CUs would have.
 
It doesn't matter what the decision was at the time the end result is still the same. Sony gambled on GDDR5 at 8GB and it paid off. It will remain to be seen if actual total tweaked performance will matter but at least from a marketing stand point SONY appears to have cleaned house. From a development standpoint the same is true. The only thing MS has been able to counter with is, well maybe when developers learn to tweak performance based on ESRAM they can catch up. Also your link is only MS side of the story, of course they will try to spin it in their favor. You only discuss SONY at 4GB but in the end that's not what happened now is it.
 
rudy said:
It doesn't matter what the decision was at the time the end result is still the same. Sony gambled on GDDR5 at 8GB and it paid off. It will remain to be seen if actual total tweaked performance will matter but at least from a marketing stand point SONY appears to have cleaned house. From a development standpoint the same is true. The only thing MS has been able to counter with is, well maybe when developers learn to tweak performance based on ESRAM they can catch up. Also your link is only MS side of the story, of course they will try to spin it in their favor. You only discuss SONY at 4GB but in the end that's not what happened now is it.
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Just look at the games even. Both systems are not difficult targets to program for , in fact this new generation might be one of the most welcoming in terms of development.

Sony ended up making a smarter bet. When I see an Xbox One I think "safe" , its big , its bulky and its whatever Microsoft thought would last the longest without the least possibility of producing an RROD. I'm sure that was their primary goal , don't cost the company over $1 Billion US in repairs again.

But while doing that they also didn't take any big risks , they went with predictable choices and it hasn't paid off. It might end up paying off in the future but right now it isn't. Sony sold 1 million PS4's in the first day in the US ALONE. MS sold 1 million across the world in a single day. I think the victor isn't that hard to spot.
 
HisSvt76 said:
Most glaze over the fact that Xbox one has FAR better wireless built into it than PS4 plus HDMI in and out.
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if you want the best network performance you won't be using WIFI in the first place this argument is moot. you will get far better network performance by hooking it directly to the Ethernet port . I believe the WIFI direct is the method used by the controllers to communicate with the console, blue tooth, which the Xbox 1 doesn't have, on PS4 is better . HDMI in and out is something most gamers care nothing about since we will not be hooking up the Kinect.
 
Cecil said:
None of that is correct.

Microsoft went with DDR3, because they wanted to have 8GB. At the time the systems were being planned out, Sony was going to go with 4GB of GDDR5 since at the time only there werent big enough ICs for 8GB. Microsoft didnt want to risk the larger ICs not coming out in time. Thats why they have DDR3.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-complete-xbox-one-interview

The CPU runs at a higher clock speed then the PS4s does as well. The GPU has less CUs, but even Sony admits they are bottlenecked with 18CUs, and scaling dropped after 14. The clock speed increase on Xbox One made more of an impact then going with 14CUs would have.
Click to expand...

read this someplace, but its likely been published in several sources The CPU on the PS4 runs between 1.6 and 2.2 GHZ depending on the graphics load the CPU on the Xbox 1 is locked at 1.75 so you can not say MS always has the higher CPU speed
 
Hmm, if I look at this, wouldn't the following the be true?

From highest priced to lowest:
  • NAND Flash memory - Doesn't the XONE have 8GB of it for the OS & Hyper-V? (Hyper-V with 2 guest OS-- XboxOS and Windows 8 kernel for Apps)
  • ESRAM - I know the MOSYS 1T-SRAM (Gamecube) was not cheap originally. Any SRAM is expensive inherently.
  • EDRAM - Xbox 360 has 32MB of this
  • XDRAM - PS3 has 256MB of this as system memory.
  • GDDR5 - PS4 has 8GB of this.
  • GDDR3 - PS3 has 256MB of this for VRAM.
  • DDR3 - XONE has 8GB of this.
So, in essence, it would make sense the XONE is possibly more expensive than the PS4 in terms of BOM (bill of materials) & any possible marketing, R&D, support, and manufacturing costs on top of it.
 
Godmachine said:
But while doing that they also didn't take any big risks , they went with predictable choices and it hasn't paid off. It might end up paying off in the future but right now it isn't. Sony sold 1 million PS4's in the first day in the US ALONE. MS sold 1 million across the world in a single day. I think the victor isn't that hard to spot.
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Both of them sold all consoles that were shipped. So where they were sold doesnt matter. If they shipped 10 million world wide vs US only, then it would. But there is no way to gauge how many either would have sold if they had more consoles shipped.
quimby999 said:
if you want the best network performance you won't be using WIFI in the first place this argument is moot. you will get far better network performance by hooking it directly to the Ethernet port . I believe the WIFI direct is the method used by the controllers to communicate with the console, blue tooth, which the Xbox 1 doesn't have, on PS4 is better . HDMI in and out is something most gamers care nothing about since we will not be hooking up the Kinect.
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Everyone I know that got an X1 uses the Kinect, and the HDMI in port. There is no cross platform chat, but the input I plug my 360 in it and can very easily bounce over to it (or snap it) to setup a party chat while I play on X1.
 
quimby999 said:
read this someplace, but its likely been published in several sources The CPU on the PS4 runs between 1.6 and 2.2 GHZ depending on the graphics load the CPU on the Xbox 1 is locked at 1.75 so you can not say MS always has the higher CPU speed
Click to expand...

That was only ever a rumor, not true. It runs at 1.6Ghz.
 
Godmachine said:
But while doing that they also didn't take any big risks , they went with predictable choices and it hasn't paid off.
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The risks aren't just about the compute hardware. There's the inclusion of the Kinect and the more general purpose nature of the Xbone that are risks as well. It could be argued that Sony took the more conservative approach buy building are more traditional gaming focused console and Microsoft took a riskier approach with a more general purpose set top box.
 
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