7 ms·

This is one of those headlines that initially reads like a joke until you think of the economics of it. "cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system

This is one of those headlines that initially reads like a joke until you think of the economics of it. "cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf computer parts." I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation hardware is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue generation through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-producing these units?

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation hardware is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue generation through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-producing these units? By 2010? Likely both.
manishsharan 4y ago
I thought PlayStation and XBoxes are subsidized by the Sony and Microsoft respectively as they make most of the money off the games and the network subscription. Nintendo is the only one that does not do that.
- vel0city 4y ago
  When it comes to network subscriptions, at the time of this article Playstation's online services were pretty much all free. It was one of the differentiators compared to Xbox's paid online services at the time. That said though, the original PS3 hardware was definitely sold at a negative margin and wouldn't be profitable until four years into the console's life. Article from 2010 talking about how the PS3 hardware had only just become profitable: https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html The console released in 2006.
- chomp 4y ago
  This is my understanding as well. A big part of this was the HD-DVD v Bluray war around that time - Sony winning with Bluray would be worth millions of dollars more, so they were willing to take a loss to get a Bluray player in each person's home.
  - cestith 4y ago
    I bought my first XBox because the XBox One Series S was at one time one of the very best 4k Blu-ray players on the market at any price and also one of the less expensive ones. The fact it could also play games was merely a bonus to me at the time.
- paulmd 4y ago
  The PS3 was an extraordinarily expensive console, between the cell processor and the bluray drive (iirc this alone was several hundred dollars) and in early models also including a whole embedded ps2 implementation. So PS3 was sold at a loss, and not just a small one, but a heavy loss, like several hundred dollars per console, and even still the PS3 was derided for being far too expensive. It was a financial disaster for sony really, moves like ripping out the embedded ps2 make complete sense in that context, and they absolutely changed their business model for subsequent consoles. Since then, consoles moved away from the exotic POWER/cell/etc custom hardware towards commodity x86 hardware based on integrated x86 APUs and haven't really been sold at a loss outside of maybe a small window at launch. PS5 moved into hardware profitability about 9 months after launch, microsoft said that the xbox series is still sold at a loss but I don't believe them because the xbox shouldn't be monumentally more expensive to build than the PS5. This is in the context of them trying to argue during the apple app store lawsuit that their lock-in on xbox store was different from the lock-in on the app store, so they have a financial incentive to make sure they "run a loss". It's either not much of a loss, or it's hollywood accounting and the money is going into their other pocket somewhere, like making the xbox division pay a parent holding company big licensing fees for on every console sold. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns-a-profit-on-499-ps5 https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns... (again, I don't agree with the "finally" spin here, this article was roughly a year after launch and they may have been turning a profit for a while before disclosing it... the consoles themselves become profitable pretty quickly.) However, this mindset that "consoles are sold at an initial loss" still persists. They're not, Sony has said they're selling the PS5 at a profit. Previous generations also reached profitability pretty quickly after launch as well. It's not 2005 anymore and the ps3 is gone. Slapping some GDDR5/GDDR6 on a semi-custom APU is dirt cheap. Even during the launch window when they do lose money it's much smaller, nobody is losing a couple hundred dollars on each console anymore like on the PS3, that model is gone.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I'm fully willing to believe the Xbox/PS5 is sold at a loss today, the margins are so thin that tiny changes in component prices could have enormous implications on how much money each hardware unit delivers. Neither of these consoles are iPhones, they don't have profit margins of 40% (or probably any double-digit percentage, for that matter). Transitioning from esoteric hardware has pretty much nothing to do with it, anyways: the N64, Gamecube and Wii all used non-standard architectures while being ludicrously profitable. The only truly significant advantage to using x86 in a home console is how easy it is to port/develop titles for it, not a single current-gen console uses commodity hardware besides the Nintendo Switch (since the Tegra board is commercially attainable).
- smoldesu 4y ago
  This is largely not true these days. The Switch sold at a loss at-launch, but slowly turned a tiny profit as shipping prices went down. The modern revisions (Switch Mini and OLED) are also priced similarly, so any profits they're making off the hardware itself is incredibly marginal.
dragontamer 4y ago
IBM cell processor was incredibly expensive. The PS3 probably was the cheapest way to play with it in practice. There is a reason why modern GPUs share an architecture with video gamers. It's not about technical advancement, as much as economics. There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers. Cell / PS3 was one attempt at making one device work with both groups, sharing research and economic investment. NVidia over the next 15 years would execute these economics better however.
- solardev 4y ago
  > There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers. And crypto people, unfortunately :(
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Depends on Proof-Of-Work method.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      I mean, it’s also true that not all supercomputer groups want TFLOPS of SIMD. Some video gamers are happy with consoles made in the 1990s. Why single out the crypto people?
      - freemint 4y ago
        90s console very much also had SIMD it was just in more fixed function hardware, DSPs or the like.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Eh, Eth miners want memory bandwidth, which is increasingly no longer correlated to compute power.
riskneutral 4y ago
Sony subsidizes the cost of the hardware, in order to sell games. They were not happy with the Airforce doing this and it probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update that disabled Linux on all PS3s.
- flutas 4y ago
  > it probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update that disabled Linux on all PS3s Pretty sure that was due to it being used to hack the PS3. > Blame for the latest culling has been pinned on computer hacker George Hotz, who was originally infamous for unlocking Apple's iPhone. In January of this year Hotz claimed that he had successfully hacked Sony's PS3 by exploiting Linux, gaining "read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV [hyper-visor] level access to the processor". > Hotz released this to the public on 26 January, boasting, "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". He may well have been right, since Sony's latest response has been to completely lock off the required 'Install Other OS' feature. Shame on pirates, shame on Sony.
- dntrkv 4y ago
  You think Sony didn't know the Airforce was doing this? It's not like they walked into Walmart and purchased 1,760 PS3s. It had to have been a direct purchase from Sony.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Walmart certainly had 1,760+ PS3s in their warehouses at one point. So the Air Force could have just direct purchased from Walmart (or Target, etc.) if Sony didn't want to sell to them. 2010: 2882 US Super Centers + 608 Sam's Club + 1578 Mexico stores + 321 Canada stores = 5389 stores People underappreciated the scale of big box national retail. ;) https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2010/11/03/walmart-stores-inc-data-sheet-worldwide-unit-details-october-2010 https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2010/11/03/walmart-st...
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Almost 90 million PS3s have been sold, so it seems entirely plausible that they could have directly bought 2000 of them through some distributor. Doesn't the military industrial complex prefer to go through its inner circle of buddies anyway?
zappo2938 4y ago
Navy submarines use XBox controllers to control parascopes.
- selectodude 4y ago
  The USAF uses them for Predator drone flying as well. I'm not really a pacifist but there is something profoundly unsettling about real-life Call of Duty.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Before this, the M67 grenade was designed to be familiar to soldiers that grew up throwing around baseballs. I find that incredibly similar to this.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      More likely game controllers over the past few decades have evolved to be really optimized for controlling the position and orientation of an entity in 3D space which happens to be the same problem for characters in videogames and many objects in the real world, and their ubiquity makes them both cheap and easy to integrate.
      - zaptrem 4y ago
        And being designed to withstand children and pro-gamers alike makes them reliable and accurate!
- tcptomato 4y ago
  periscopes ...
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Also used to control drones and robots in other branches of the armed forces.
masklinn 4y ago
Sony sold the consoles at a loss, and likely had the CPUs for much cheaper owing to having bankrolled the chip itself.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

>I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation hardware is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue generation through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-producing these units? By 2010? Likely both.

manishsharan 4y ago

I thought PlayStation and XBoxes are subsidized by the Sony and Microsoft respectively as they make most of the money off the games and the network subscription. Nintendo is the only one that does not do that.

vel0city 4y ago
When it comes to network subscriptions, at the time of this article Playstation's online services were pretty much all free. It was one of the differentiators compared to Xbox's paid online services at the time. That said though, the original PS3 hardware was definitely sold at a negative margin and wouldn't be profitable until four years into the console's life. Article from 2010 talking about how the PS3 hardware had only just become profitable: https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html The console released in 2006.
chomp 4y ago
This is my understanding as well. A big part of this was the HD-DVD v Bluray war around that time - Sony winning with Bluray would be worth millions of dollars more, so they were willing to take a loss to get a Bluray player in each person's home.
- cestith 4y ago
  I bought my first XBox because the XBox One Series S was at one time one of the very best 4k Blu-ray players on the market at any price and also one of the less expensive ones. The fact it could also play games was merely a bonus to me at the time.
paulmd 4y ago
The PS3 was an extraordinarily expensive console, between the cell processor and the bluray drive (iirc this alone was several hundred dollars) and in early models also including a whole embedded ps2 implementation. So PS3 was sold at a loss, and not just a small one, but a heavy loss, like several hundred dollars per console, and even still the PS3 was derided for being far too expensive. It was a financial disaster for sony really, moves like ripping out the embedded ps2 make complete sense in that context, and they absolutely changed their business model for subsequent consoles. Since then, consoles moved away from the exotic POWER/cell/etc custom hardware towards commodity x86 hardware based on integrated x86 APUs and haven't really been sold at a loss outside of maybe a small window at launch. PS5 moved into hardware profitability about 9 months after launch, microsoft said that the xbox series is still sold at a loss but I don't believe them because the xbox shouldn't be monumentally more expensive to build than the PS5. This is in the context of them trying to argue during the apple app store lawsuit that their lock-in on xbox store was different from the lock-in on the app store, so they have a financial incentive to make sure they "run a loss". It's either not much of a loss, or it's hollywood accounting and the money is going into their other pocket somewhere, like making the xbox division pay a parent holding company big licensing fees for on every console sold. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns-a-profit-on-499-ps5 https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns... (again, I don't agree with the "finally" spin here, this article was roughly a year after launch and they may have been turning a profit for a while before disclosing it... the consoles themselves become profitable pretty quickly.) However, this mindset that "consoles are sold at an initial loss" still persists. They're not, Sony has said they're selling the PS5 at a profit. Previous generations also reached profitability pretty quickly after launch as well. It's not 2005 anymore and the ps3 is gone. Slapping some GDDR5/GDDR6 on a semi-custom APU is dirt cheap. Even during the launch window when they do lose money it's much smaller, nobody is losing a couple hundred dollars on each console anymore like on the PS3, that model is gone.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I'm fully willing to believe the Xbox/PS5 is sold at a loss today, the margins are so thin that tiny changes in component prices could have enormous implications on how much money each hardware unit delivers. Neither of these consoles are iPhones, they don't have profit margins of 40% (or probably any double-digit percentage, for that matter). Transitioning from esoteric hardware has pretty much nothing to do with it, anyways: the N64, Gamecube and Wii all used non-standard architectures while being ludicrously profitable. The only truly significant advantage to using x86 in a home console is how easy it is to port/develop titles for it, not a single current-gen console uses commodity hardware besides the Nintendo Switch (since the Tegra board is commercially attainable).
smoldesu 4y ago
This is largely not true these days. The Switch sold at a loss at-launch, but slowly turned a tiny profit as shipping prices went down. The modern revisions (Switch Mini and OLED) are also priced similarly, so any profits they're making off the hardware itself is incredibly marginal.

dragontamer 4y ago

IBM cell processor was incredibly expensive. The PS3 probably was the cheapest way to play with it in practice. There is a reason why modern GPUs share an architecture with video gamers. It's not about technical advancement, as much as economics. There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers. Cell / PS3 was one attempt at making one device work with both groups, sharing research and economic investment. NVidia over the next 15 years would execute these economics better however.

solardev 4y ago
> There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers. And crypto people, unfortunately :(
- cowtools 4y ago
  Depends on Proof-Of-Work method.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I mean, it’s also true that not all supercomputer groups want TFLOPS of SIMD. Some video gamers are happy with consoles made in the 1990s. Why single out the crypto people?
    - freemint 4y ago
      90s console very much also had SIMD it was just in more fixed function hardware, DSPs or the like.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Eh, Eth miners want memory bandwidth, which is increasingly no longer correlated to compute power.

riskneutral 4y ago

Sony subsidizes the cost of the hardware, in order to sell games. They were not happy with the Airforce doing this and it probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update that disabled Linux on all PS3s.

flutas 4y ago
> it probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update that disabled Linux on all PS3s Pretty sure that was due to it being used to hack the PS3. > Blame for the latest culling has been pinned on computer hacker George Hotz, who was originally infamous for unlocking Apple's iPhone. In January of this year Hotz claimed that he had successfully hacked Sony's PS3 by exploiting Linux, gaining "read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV [hyper-visor] level access to the processor". > Hotz released this to the public on 26 January, boasting, "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". He may well have been right, since Sony's latest response has been to completely lock off the required 'Install Other OS' feature. Shame on pirates, shame on Sony.
dntrkv 4y ago
You think Sony didn't know the Airforce was doing this? It's not like they walked into Walmart and purchased 1,760 PS3s. It had to have been a direct purchase from Sony.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Walmart certainly had 1,760+ PS3s in their warehouses at one point. So the Air Force could have just direct purchased from Walmart (or Target, etc.) if Sony didn't want to sell to them. 2010: 2882 US Super Centers + 608 Sam's Club + 1578 Mexico stores + 321 Canada stores = 5389 stores People underappreciated the scale of big box national retail. ;) https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2010/11/03/walmart-stores-inc-data-sheet-worldwide-unit-details-october-2010 https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2010/11/03/walmart-st...
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Almost 90 million PS3s have been sold, so it seems entirely plausible that they could have directly bought 2000 of them through some distributor. Doesn't the military industrial complex prefer to go through its inner circle of buddies anyway?

zappo2938 4y ago

Navy submarines use XBox controllers to control parascopes.

selectodude 4y ago
The USAF uses them for Predator drone flying as well. I'm not really a pacifist but there is something profoundly unsettling about real-life Call of Duty.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Before this, the M67 grenade was designed to be familiar to soldiers that grew up throwing around baseballs. I find that incredibly similar to this.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    More likely game controllers over the past few decades have evolved to be really optimized for controlling the position and orientation of an entity in 3D space which happens to be the same problem for characters in videogames and many objects in the real world, and their ubiquity makes them both cheap and easy to integrate.
    - zaptrem 4y ago
      And being designed to withstand children and pro-gamers alike makes them reliable and accurate!
tcptomato 4y ago
periscopes ...
29athrowaway 4y ago
Also used to control drones and robots in other branches of the armed forces.

masklinn 4y ago

Sony sold the consoles at a loss, and likely had the CPUs for much cheaper owing to having bankrolled the chip itself.