Comment Re:Not "less powerful", but "less investment" (Score 1) 353
My idea was:
CPUs/GPUs :
Yeah, they used a off-the-shelf design for the GPU, but I'm not sure if Cell can be called an "off-the-shelf" processor - the problem was the SPEs were a completely new design, which not only requires a whole set of new compilers & software infrastructure, but which actually needed a completely new research field on compiler design. Because the SPE could only address the limited amount of scratchpad memory (external memory could only be accessed via the DMA) that added so much headache on software design, which could only be done by a crazy amount of hand-tuning. Add other typical VLIW scheduling problems, and you have a ton of headache optimizing software.
As a result, they couldn't rely on off-the-shelf software & tools, and had to design their own software stack & tools, which had zero guarantee to have better quality than proven-to-work tools.
DRAM :
The problem of DRAMs is that it's a ultra-cheap commodity product, where one design gets manufactured in billions. Once you turn to something nobody else uses, it turns extremely expensive - not only the manufacturing cost, but it becomes difficult to deal when there are supply issues (e.g., nobody else can supply the DRAM if your primary manufacturer gets hit by an earthquake/tsunami/strike/thermonuclear war/whatever) which adds a lot of risk.
Using these low-volume products on limited places will make the problem even worse because it will further reduce the volume. I'd rather have less performance than use a low-volume part which can potentially add a lot of risk on mass-manufacturing. Additionally, if you want bandwidth, you always have the possibility to add more parallel DRAM channels - although it may be inefficient & costly, I'd rather choose that.
Blu-ray:
What I meant was that the PS4 shouldn't use something beyond Blu-ray. One of the biggest problem of PS3 was that they tried to use a next-generation optical medium (instead of the proven solution) and thus, had a lot of manufacturing problems. Now that Blu-ray is quite stable and affordable, I guess PS4 should use Blu-ray (yeah, probably a 4-layer design) instead of developing something else.