The reddit post actually went up shortly
before the Wired article.
Another interesting point to make regarding this rumor is that TSMC actually consulted with Sony (among others) during the development of InFO_MS, which would make Sony familiar with it and probably in the back of their mind when developing consoles. I'd also like to point out that Sony is not a stranger to being inventive with memory. The Vita had a
special packaging method in use to get very high bandwidth to the Vita's GPU.
Also, let's assume for a second there was a typo in the original rumor, because it doesn't quite make sense as it is. It says:
Which doesn't make sense. Typically when we talk about GPUs, we talk about GB/s per GF/TF, not the other way around. However, 40GB/s per GF would be a stupidly low number, so let's now assume they meant TF. We need a second part of the comment for future information
1.6Gbps per second would result in 409.6GB/s in a 2-stack config. 1.7Gbps bumps it to 435.2GB/s, which is competitive with 256-bit GDDR6 solutions. If we're now assuming the 40-50 GB/s per TF is valid, this gives us a range of
8.7TF to 10.875TF for PS5.
Finally, regarding my skepticism around HBM2 supply, some key things have happened since Samsung's comments about low capacity. SK Hynix and Micron have both entered the market in full force (after the latter abandoned HMC development). And the crypto market crashed. With DRAM
and NAND markets easing up, that capacity has to shift somewhere.
Regarding HBM pricing, it's hard to know much it has eased over the past few years (we do have some Vega VII rumored costs for reference), but I think it may be possible to get it down to less than 50% more than GDDR6 per GB, perhaps even just
35% to 40% higher. When you consider that they just need 8GB instead of 16GB of GDDR6, their solution is extremely cost competitive. At that point, it becomes a lot more attractive. HBM is also done on contract pricing (i.e. not floating with market costs), so a big order from Sony locks that factor in and sets up a mutually beneficial relationship with that partner to help them build up their own capacity.
The only rumor around this giving me pause is the digitimes rumor that stated
ASE will do the packaging. Other than that, a lot of this rumor makes sense the more I dig into it.
Also, I imagine if that PS4 rev mentioned is coming, it's definitely this Fall. Since it's a console rev, it may not get cracked open to confirm the 7nm EUV from Samsung part, but the timing makes so much sense with MS pushing costs down with the SAD model and the rumored E-revision of the device internals.
Finally, here's the
rumor in its entirety for posterity:
