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161

Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts (arstechnica.com)

submitted 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.

But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

It’s not that they’re not improving like they used to, it’s that the die can’t shrink any more.

Price cuts and “slim” models used to be possible due to die shrinks. A console might have released on 100nm, and then a process improvement comes out that means it can be made on 50nm, meaning 2x as many chips on a wafer and half the power usage and heat generation. This allowed smaller and cheaper revisions.

Now that the current ones are already on like 4nm, there’s just nowhere to shrink to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Which itself is a gimmick, they've just made the gates taller, electron leakage would happen otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

NM has been a marketing gimmick since Intel launched their long-standing 14nm node. Actual transistor density depending on which fab you compare to is shambles.

It's now a title / name of a process and not representative of how small the transistors are.

I've not paid for a CPU upgrade since 2020, and before that I was using a 22nm CPU from 2014. The market isn't exciting (to me anymore), I don't even want to talk about the GPUs.

Back in the late 90s or early 2000s upgrades felt substantial and exciting, now it's all same-same with some minor power efficiency gains.