I would say roughly a year. It takes time to manufacturer millions and millions of products...but there are also many variables that can slow or speed it up.
Next Iteration Gaming: Neo, NX, and Scorpio, v. 2
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I would say roughly a year. It takes time to manufacturer millions and millions of products...but there are also many variables that can slow or speed it up.
The article i clicked on definitely lists and quotes two guys throughout as the source of the information and analysis provided - who are experts in the field with decades of expertise in analysis, hardware, marketing and software. It has both of their names listed.
They are the source. Quote them.
If you want to see the full teardown... go pay for it and let us know your expert opinion.
How someone can deduce a fully cataloged hardware breakdown and analysis by industry experts as "rumor", is beyond me. Do you think they're rolling D-20's or something?
https://technology.ihs.com/Teardowns/detail/?ids=581673_2983
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Listing their names is not sourcing your work. It's just a link to their bios with zero information on the teardown. But your advice is just subscribe and pay them $80,000 and their source materials for their research will magically appear. Trying to hide your lie behind a pay wall isn't nice.
I have no clue wtf you're going on about at this point... every quote in the article has a name attached to it as the source of the information.
The only thing conclusive from your end is that you have no leg to stand on and you don't mind at all that you are just spewing nonsense. I'm not even sure why any is bothering to respond to you on this topic at this point, as you are not even willing to uphold your end of the debate other than baseless misinformed assumption.
Actually, no, you can't quote or source yourself, which is exactly what their press release does. You can't write an essay paper on climate change and when asked for sources write "meeeeee." It doesn't work that way.
It's written by an IHS employee who quotes another IHS employee buy not before being reviewed by another IHS employee. So yeah, IHS is quoting itself.
You can't quote yourself. That's not how peer reviewing works. You can't be the the prosecutor and the plaintiff at the same time.
There's a difference between being skeptical and accusing people of lying.
Wouldn't this company tarnish their reputation by just making stuff up?
Wouldn't this company tarnish their reputation by just making stuff up?
But that is what they are doing: "making things up." They call these costs "estimates," and so they aren't claiming to actually know the real costs. So they do have themselves covered there. But maybe they do have numbers for us average joe readers and then for their subscribers, and it would be hard for us to catch it because they aren't making it easy for others to review their claims.
They are making things up based off of intimate knowledge of the market, hardware, and logistics.. so much so that companies are willing to dump bug bucks on their research and analysis. The company that other companies use as a reference has pretty good standing from my pov.
Versus someone that writes . Microsofts Taking a tanking on the Xbox one S with zero sources to back that up with .
Kassen has intimate knowledge of how MS loses money and nobody will prove it otherwise. Even though he himself has no proof.
I don't think you understand how consultants and research firms work. With that, it shows me that you probably don't work at a job involving anything to do with business and analysis. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm going to give you some tips how they work.
- These types of companies specialize in doing analysis. In this case they seem to do lots of teardown costing breakdowns. A company like NPD specializes in sales data tracking (retail and now digital), and they also do price analysis. They go hand in hand as a sales tracking compilation includes both units and dollars
- The companies always come up with aggregate estimates based on real info they have, and using their judgement on "total market" to estimate stuff they don't know. For example, NPD knows that Walmart sells 100,000 copies of a game, but they don't know what a different retailer sells, or any mom and pop stores. They come up with a total estimate. Walmart doesn't now how many copies are sold at the cash register of competing stores. The same goes for costing. IHS may know certain actual costing, but the rest is estimates. In fact, any company can in that industry can estimate the costs of a competing product based on material costs and estimated packaging costs. Our company does the same thing to competing products.
That's why companies buy their detailed data to know who is doing what.
- Companies like this can do well because businesses with little knowledge on costing for products they don't have experience with need info
- The info is also useful for the companies making the components because they can see how their prices compare to the analysis to see if it's too high or too low.
Costing is a very confidential piece of info. The only people who would know the exact penny paid to make an X1 S are people actually working at MS. That doesn't mean info like IHS isn't useful.... or as business people like to say.... "directional".
Don't take IHS info like this too literal to the penny. If you are trying to debunk every piece of anaylsis or storyline in the world you won't get far in the business world.
Electronics is a more complex industry with tons of parts. Most people don't know the cost or have a clue where to start, but to give an example of a simple product that anyone can estimate, a pack of chips let's say costs $3. Many people don't know this, but I know that typical retailer margins on most stuff is about 35% (round to 33% to make it easy). So to me, their cost price is roughly $2. I also know that most manufacturers making boring every goods typically have a COGs ratio of about 30% of the retail price ($0.90). A product like chips has a higher ratio of distribution costs because they are big airy products of low value. So I'm going to ballpark total COGs about 40% of retail price ($1.20). These aren't $500 iPhones that take up the space of a calculator. Adding in other costs may be another 10-20% of list price.
I don't even have to know the price of potatoes or salt. But I bet my ballpark estimate is pretty close.
So taking that all in, I'll ballpark a bag of chips as follows:
Retail price: $3.00
Retailer COGS $2.00 (also the supplier's selling price to them)
Retailer margin $1.00
Retailer margin % 33%
Supplier COGs $1.20 (COGs and distribution costs)
Supplier extra costs $0.20 (kickbacks and promotions)
Supplier total costs $1.40
Supplier margin $0.60
Supplier margin 30% of their selling price
I don't work at Lay's chips, but I bet my estimate above is pretty close to their product P/L. Other costs like overhead, marketing and such are additional costs that aren't even factored in (similar to the IHS report).
A rough ballpark is the 1/3rd model when it comes to normal stuff you buy at Walmart or a grocery store.
Retail price $1.00
1. Retailer margin $0.33 (1/3rd)
Retailer cost $0.67
2. Suppler margin $0.33 (1/3rd)
3. Supplier COGs $0.33 (1/3rd)... (all costs associated with selling the product)
Although some things like clothing has huge margins at 50%+. That pair of $100 jeans you buy at a department store probably costs a store only $30-40. That's why stores can sell sweaters and pants for half off and still breakeven or make a tiny bit of money. On the other hand, you never see a store selling a TV at 50% off.
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http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/18/drilling-down-into-ps4-pros-4k-graphics-on-horizon-zero-dawn/
Drilling down into PS4 Pro’s 4K graphics on Horizon Zero Dawn
DEAN TAKAHASHI AND HARRISON WEBER SEPTEMBER 18, 2016 7:02 AM
Sony touted the 4K graphics capabilities of its PlayStation Pro video game console at its event in New York City a couple of weeks ago.
VentureBeat’s Harrison Web attended the event and was able to check out games running on 4K TVs. You could say that Sony really wants gamers to believe that the benefits of almost-4K games and high-dynamic range (HDR) for games such as the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn, a big sci-fi PS4 exclusive coming early next year..
Developer Guerrilla Games confirmed in a press roundtable that it isn’t rendering Horizon: Zero Dawn at the 3,840×2,160 resolution that is standard for 4K. Sony itself plainly stated during its event in Manhattan that it didn’t want to make a machine that could fill all 8 million pixels of a 4K television set.
Web stayed around for a Q&A with Hermen Hulst, the managing director at Guerrilla Games. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.
Question: This is being marketed as a 4K console for 4K gaming. How are you approaching that as far as the resolution you’re rendering at?
Hermen Hulst: The big thing about the Pro is it can handle 4K and HDR. First, I can tell you that it’s massive in terms of the visual difference, but it’s not massively different in how we make games. Our games have been running HDR since Killzone 3. But only now do we have displays that can actually show that. A lot of our assets are already prepared, future-proofed to be able to handle very high resolutions, but only now do we have displays that can show that as well. A lot of the content in the game is identical. It’s just shown now on these very high-end displays.
Question: Are you talking about the exact rendering resolution at this point? Are you rendering in 4K?
Hulst: There’s a lot of magic happening. It’s all very complicated and Mark Cerny has a fantastic seminar planned in a couple of weeks where he goes into the nitty-gritty of it. It’s not native 4K, but as you’ve seen for yourself on the screens, it’s acceptably so. It’s close enough that you can see the difference with normal human eyes.
Question: Is it safe to say that it will be easy to have a game that works on both the new model and the previous model?
Hulst: Yes. It’s not like we have separate teams working on different versions. We have maybe one or two technicians looking at the specifics of the hardware, but everybody’s making the game. Obviously somebody like JB, as an art director, will specifically look at how we can optimize for HDR, how the image can truly stand out in 4K. But it isn’t something that’s going to split off a second team.
Question: Your current project is very far along in development. Will this affect your development strategy for your next project when you can take it into consideration from the very beginning? Or will you still look at PS4 as the base, and then consider what extra things you can do? How will the Pro factor into your thinking at the start of a project?
Hulst: The biggest thing will be HDR, because it’s quite a paradigm shift in how you deal with color. It gets very nerdy at this point. HDR involves a richer color palette, so we’ll have to rewire how we deal with this, how we can make sure it looks good on both displays. It’ll always look better on an HDR 4K display, but it’ll still look stunning on a normal display. We’ll have to find ways of dealing with that, and that will definitely be part of the next project, whatever that may be. We’ll take that in on the ground level and make sure both versions are really good.
Question: Sony has said it’ll be rolling out HDR to older generations of PlayStations. Is there a difference between the HDR we’ll see from the Pro and older consoles?
Hulst: The only difference there, really, will be resolution.
Question: Will the earlier PS4s have software HDR?
Hulst: Technically, it works a bit differently. It depends on the type of signal that comes out. We’ll get into technical details later.
Question: Are you thinking about games you made previously, your back catalog?
Hulst: Currently, we’re only working on Horizon: Zero Dawn for PS4 Pro. That’s the most ambitious project our studio has ever worked on. We’re very busy with that.
Question: Can you talk about specific points in Horizon that benefit the most from HDR?
Hulst: It’s definitely the sky lighting. We’ve put a lot of effort into making the skies feel very rich, making them look as close to natural as possible. We got really close with normal displays, and then when we got the HDR screens, it’s like, “Oh, there’s so much more we can do.” That’s one area where we’re looking into making things work much better, getting much closer to the majesty of real nature.
There are other aspects as well. We have areas in the game where you see a lot of holograms, and this is a place where we can play with some really vibrant colors, get something out there that we wouldn’t have been able to show on a normal display. There are specific places we can really make a difference.
Question: Can you talk about specific things that may look better with the game running on a Pro, but on a 1080p TV?
Hulst: You’re always making tradeoffs as far as image quality versus performance. With a Pro, we don’t necessarily need to do that anymore. We can have the image quality and the performance without making the subtle tradeoffs – things that most people might never notice, but that we’re very attuned to. That may be one of the areas where—what it’ll do is render the game at 4K, and then use a technique called super-sampling to send it to a 1080p screen. It’s similar to how renders get done for movies, where it’s rendered at a very high sample rate and then sent to a normal screen. It’ll be a much more stable, much more aesthetically pleasing image from a technical point of view.
Question: With super-sampling, does that mean aliased edges will look better?
Hulst: Jagged edges won’t exist. Any graininess will be removed. It’ll be a much crisper image. The resolution will be very even. And the framerate will be positively impacted.
We can automatically detect what your display is. We want to make it very accessible. We don’t want to have to give you a lot of options as far as what filtering techniques to use and so on, like you see on PCs. We know exactly what the hardware can do and what display you have. If you have a 4K screen, we’ll know that and we’ll optimize for it. If you have a 1080p screen, which many people will still have, we’ll optimize for that experience as well. There aren’t any negatives for the vast majority of players who are still on 1080p. They’ll have a very solid 1080p experience.
Question: Can you talk about temporal and spatial AA in a way a non-tech person could understand?
Hulst: Wow. On a very simple level, spatial AA is if you look at a static image and see jaggies, temporal AA is if you look at a moving image and see shimmer. That’s the two things the Pro will be specifically good at combating.
Question: You mentioned the Pro will allow you to have higher framerates?
Hulst: Smoother framerates, which isn’t exactly the same thing. Some games are brilliant, like Uncharted 4 – it runs perfectly and never drops a single frame. But that’s an exception. Not many games are like that. Most games will have moments where framerate drops. That’s especially nasty in a multiplayer game where there are too many explosions going on. Things chug down a bit. Because there’s more power, more room in the Pro, maybe if you’re running your game at 1080, that will all go away. You might have a very stable framerate.
Question: Can you talk more about what’s specifically better in the game because of the Pro hardware?
Hulst: For our game specifically, the colors are very interesting. It allows us to show nature and all these vistas in a way that’s much closer to what reality looks like. That was one of the reasons behind the Horizon: Zero Dawn project. We wanted the fantasy of hunting these robot machines to be set in a kind of BBC nature documentary. It’s a big deal that we have HDR accessible in the experience.
Question: You said that you won’t have user-facing visual settings for HDR specifically. If the game detects that you have an HDR TV, you can’t turn off the HDR image?
Hulst: It should be possible to set your TV to normal HD on that end. But there’s probably not going to be any reason you would want to do that.
Question: I’m sure you were in contact with Sony and Mark Cerny’s team in the process of developing the Pro hardware. Is there anything you as developers pushed for specifically in those conversations?
Hulst: With Mark driving that, it’s great for us that there’s now this improvement in between cycles. From day one, as a studio we were encouraging Sony to do that. We were already pushing the envelope, because we as a studio have a legacy of embracing the hardware and seeing what we can do with it. But there wasn’t so much a specific feature that emanated from a Guerrilla request. Mark has a very nice feel for the development community. Not even just Worldwide Studios, but what the broader development community wants, and what the consumer base wants as well.
Drilling down into PS4 Pro’s 4K graphics on Horizon Zero Dawn
DEAN TAKAHASHI AND HARRISON WEBER SEPTEMBER 18, 2016 7:02 AM
Sony touted the 4K graphics capabilities of its PlayStation Pro video game console at its event in New York City a couple of weeks ago.
VentureBeat’s Harrison Web attended the event and was able to check out games running on 4K TVs. You could say that Sony really wants gamers to believe that the benefits of almost-4K games and high-dynamic range (HDR) for games such as the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn, a big sci-fi PS4 exclusive coming early next year..
Developer Guerrilla Games confirmed in a press roundtable that it isn’t rendering Horizon: Zero Dawn at the 3,840×2,160 resolution that is standard for 4K. Sony itself plainly stated during its event in Manhattan that it didn’t want to make a machine that could fill all 8 million pixels of a 4K television set.
Web stayed around for a Q&A with Hermen Hulst, the managing director at Guerrilla Games. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.
Question: This is being marketed as a 4K console for 4K gaming. How are you approaching that as far as the resolution you’re rendering at?
Hermen Hulst: The big thing about the Pro is it can handle 4K and HDR. First, I can tell you that it’s massive in terms of the visual difference, but it’s not massively different in how we make games. Our games have been running HDR since Killzone 3. But only now do we have displays that can actually show that. A lot of our assets are already prepared, future-proofed to be able to handle very high resolutions, but only now do we have displays that can show that as well. A lot of the content in the game is identical. It’s just shown now on these very high-end displays.
Question: Are you talking about the exact rendering resolution at this point? Are you rendering in 4K?
Hulst: There’s a lot of magic happening. It’s all very complicated and Mark Cerny has a fantastic seminar planned in a couple of weeks where he goes into the nitty-gritty of it. It’s not native 4K, but as you’ve seen for yourself on the screens, it’s acceptably so. It’s close enough that you can see the difference with normal human eyes.
Question: Is it safe to say that it will be easy to have a game that works on both the new model and the previous model?
Hulst: Yes. It’s not like we have separate teams working on different versions. We have maybe one or two technicians looking at the specifics of the hardware, but everybody’s making the game. Obviously somebody like JB, as an art director, will specifically look at how we can optimize for HDR, how the image can truly stand out in 4K. But it isn’t something that’s going to split off a second team.
Question: Your current project is very far along in development. Will this affect your development strategy for your next project when you can take it into consideration from the very beginning? Or will you still look at PS4 as the base, and then consider what extra things you can do? How will the Pro factor into your thinking at the start of a project?
Hulst: The biggest thing will be HDR, because it’s quite a paradigm shift in how you deal with color. It gets very nerdy at this point. HDR involves a richer color palette, so we’ll have to rewire how we deal with this, how we can make sure it looks good on both displays. It’ll always look better on an HDR 4K display, but it’ll still look stunning on a normal display. We’ll have to find ways of dealing with that, and that will definitely be part of the next project, whatever that may be. We’ll take that in on the ground level and make sure both versions are really good.
Question: Sony has said it’ll be rolling out HDR to older generations of PlayStations. Is there a difference between the HDR we’ll see from the Pro and older consoles?
Hulst: The only difference there, really, will be resolution.
Question: Will the earlier PS4s have software HDR?
Hulst: Technically, it works a bit differently. It depends on the type of signal that comes out. We’ll get into technical details later.
Question: Are you thinking about games you made previously, your back catalog?
Hulst: Currently, we’re only working on Horizon: Zero Dawn for PS4 Pro. That’s the most ambitious project our studio has ever worked on. We’re very busy with that.
Question: Can you talk about specific points in Horizon that benefit the most from HDR?
Hulst: It’s definitely the sky lighting. We’ve put a lot of effort into making the skies feel very rich, making them look as close to natural as possible. We got really close with normal displays, and then when we got the HDR screens, it’s like, “Oh, there’s so much more we can do.” That’s one area where we’re looking into making things work much better, getting much closer to the majesty of real nature.
There are other aspects as well. We have areas in the game where you see a lot of holograms, and this is a place where we can play with some really vibrant colors, get something out there that we wouldn’t have been able to show on a normal display. There are specific places we can really make a difference.
Question: Can you talk about specific things that may look better with the game running on a Pro, but on a 1080p TV?
Hulst: You’re always making tradeoffs as far as image quality versus performance. With a Pro, we don’t necessarily need to do that anymore. We can have the image quality and the performance without making the subtle tradeoffs – things that most people might never notice, but that we’re very attuned to. That may be one of the areas where—what it’ll do is render the game at 4K, and then use a technique called super-sampling to send it to a 1080p screen. It’s similar to how renders get done for movies, where it’s rendered at a very high sample rate and then sent to a normal screen. It’ll be a much more stable, much more aesthetically pleasing image from a technical point of view.
Question: With super-sampling, does that mean aliased edges will look better?
Hulst: Jagged edges won’t exist. Any graininess will be removed. It’ll be a much crisper image. The resolution will be very even. And the framerate will be positively impacted.
We can automatically detect what your display is. We want to make it very accessible. We don’t want to have to give you a lot of options as far as what filtering techniques to use and so on, like you see on PCs. We know exactly what the hardware can do and what display you have. If you have a 4K screen, we’ll know that and we’ll optimize for it. If you have a 1080p screen, which many people will still have, we’ll optimize for that experience as well. There aren’t any negatives for the vast majority of players who are still on 1080p. They’ll have a very solid 1080p experience.
Question: Can you talk about temporal and spatial AA in a way a non-tech person could understand?
Hulst: Wow. On a very simple level, spatial AA is if you look at a static image and see jaggies, temporal AA is if you look at a moving image and see shimmer. That’s the two things the Pro will be specifically good at combating.
Question: You mentioned the Pro will allow you to have higher framerates?
Hulst: Smoother framerates, which isn’t exactly the same thing. Some games are brilliant, like Uncharted 4 – it runs perfectly and never drops a single frame. But that’s an exception. Not many games are like that. Most games will have moments where framerate drops. That’s especially nasty in a multiplayer game where there are too many explosions going on. Things chug down a bit. Because there’s more power, more room in the Pro, maybe if you’re running your game at 1080, that will all go away. You might have a very stable framerate.
Question: Can you talk more about what’s specifically better in the game because of the Pro hardware?
Hulst: For our game specifically, the colors are very interesting. It allows us to show nature and all these vistas in a way that’s much closer to what reality looks like. That was one of the reasons behind the Horizon: Zero Dawn project. We wanted the fantasy of hunting these robot machines to be set in a kind of BBC nature documentary. It’s a big deal that we have HDR accessible in the experience.
Question: You said that you won’t have user-facing visual settings for HDR specifically. If the game detects that you have an HDR TV, you can’t turn off the HDR image?
Hulst: It should be possible to set your TV to normal HD on that end. But there’s probably not going to be any reason you would want to do that.
Question: I’m sure you were in contact with Sony and Mark Cerny’s team in the process of developing the Pro hardware. Is there anything you as developers pushed for specifically in those conversations?
Hulst: With Mark driving that, it’s great for us that there’s now this improvement in between cycles. From day one, as a studio we were encouraging Sony to do that. We were already pushing the envelope, because we as a studio have a legacy of embracing the hardware and seeing what we can do with it. But there wasn’t so much a specific feature that emanated from a Guerrilla request. Mark has a very nice feel for the development community. Not even just Worldwide Studios, but what the broader development community wants, and what the consumer base wants as well.
Someone get Forbes on the line, the ever-objective Kassen's opinion differs from published articles cited by actual journalists. I'd give you more credit if you had ever managed to pull up that class action Windows 8 lawsuit that you mentioned multiple times, but when asked to produce any actual information about it, failed completely to do so. You've demonstrated that your sweeping statements about fact when you have an interest in the argument need citation to be given little credence, and the fact that you're continuing to attack the source of the only published data to date without being able to provide any of your own suggests that you should, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, shut up about this until you actually have something factual to contribute or wish to discuss your opinions and CLEARLY label them as such.
[note: I edited this today, 9/19, because I had put it as a Windows 10 lawsuit when I think he said it was actually Windows 8; the conversation was about W10 but I misremembered. I was wrong with that detail and have thus corrected it. Would that the media could have the same commitment.]
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Its nearly a cake but its not quite like a real cake.Its close enough to a real cake that you can taste the difference with normal taste buds and can be acceptable. Its very complicated you see and I hear there is a seminar planned where Mark Cerny will go into great detail on his secret recipe. Apparently he added magic and unicorn dust and stuff.
This is what I was getting at. Thanks for the examples. You obviously know more of this stuff than I do.
I'm not really comfortable with appeals to authority- as if Forbes is Truth simply because they are "journalists" and a large publication- but I agree with the sentiment. In a situation where I can't find the numbers myself, having a "reputable" publication backing up a theory is better than not.
Pro uses additional memory you were wrong admit it.
I don't care about Scorp and the rest of this post.
That's illogical.
My point was Sony could have sold more PS3 units if they didn't make the mistake about including blu-ray at a time when it cost them $200 to do it (small install base of Blu-ray media, slow adoption of 1080p displays, and huge cost to console for relatively small gain).
And Sony would sell far MORE PS4 pro's if they would have added UHD Blu-ray, which would have been a very small additional cost for a big upside in value.
Xbox sales have nothing to do with either of those.
So your post is still irrelevant.
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