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Eurogamer on Playstation 5 Teardown - thinking about cost

Lort

Banned
Im suprised i havent seen a thread about this .. so if so pls close



Ootori seems to almost 'peel back' the white panels either side of the console before pulling them away. Under there, we get to see the dual inlets for the custom 120mm main fan. Of course, 120mm is a standard when it comes to building PCs but the 45mm depth of the custom unit is something else. It's also here where we see ducts designed for users to vacuum out excess dust that could clog up the cooling assembly. This was a major failing for PS4 and contributed to its increasing loudness of time and it's good to see this addressed without having to dismantle the unit and void the warranty - as was the case for the PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro.

Once the WiFi and Bluetooth antennas are removed, shielding is taken away and we get our first look at the mainboard - a significantly simpler setup than the Microsoft Series X equivalent, which actually splits the whole design into individual processor and southbridge boards. There's only one board with PS5, the memory system is far less complex, and the board hardly looks packed by comparison. This is where we get our first look at the SoC (system on chip) - the main 'brains' of the system. Ootori himself describes this as a small, but highly clocked processor using a liquid metal thermal interface to ensure an optimal transfer of heat between the chip and the cooling assembly. This ticks off another noteworthy revision over PS4 and Pro, both of which were hardly renowned for the quality of their thermal grease.

The size of the SoC is interesting and often indicative of aspects of the design such as transistor count - not to mention having a big cost implication. Some online discussion suggests a 308mm2 chip, based on comparison to the GDDR6 layout seen around the main processor. With no square-on look at the chip, and no direct comparison points evident, getting a firm lock on the area of the processor is challenging, but something in the 305mm2 to 320mm2 seems likely when compared to Xbox Series X. Here, we have a fully annotated die shot and a confirmed area - stripping back 16 compute units and a couple of GDDR6 memory controllers certainly puts us in that ballpark. Compared to the Series X, the whole setup here in terms of the processor and the memory represents a significant cost saving.

The teardown also affords us a look at the SSD - built into the motherboard with the controller chip surrounded by NAND flash modules. The 5.5GB/s of raw bandwidth (even before factoring in the additional boost offered by hardware decompression) is a matter of record now - my only concern being that repairability and durability of SSDs are still something of a question mark. A defective console SSD basically makes repair impossible, beyond returning the unit to Sony. The M.2 storage expansion bay is also revealed - this is where the latest generation of PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives should have the requisite bandwidth to match Sony's internal solution, allowing off-the-shelf SSDs to be added for extra storage. The upgrade procedure looks simple enough, but these drives can get hot and I do wonder how the system aims to cool them - it's not clear from this video how this achieved.

The teardown ends with a look at the ginormous heatsink and a meaty 350W power supply (expect actual power draw to be a lot, lot lower). It's pretty clear what Sony's strategy is here with hardware design: to keep costs manageable with a small processor, but increase performance by blasting it with a high level of power, diverted to CPU and GPU frequencies as needed. Dissipating the heat is all down to what I'd consider an almost Toyota-like philosophy - not to reinvent the wheel (in the way that Microsoft has with Series X perhaps) but to rely upon what works and to add some extra flourishes where needed. The price we pay comes in terms of sheer volume: this is clearly going to be a huge console, relatively speaking, but the advantage to Sony is a considerable reduction in build cost.
 

On Demand

Banned
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Tmack

Member
Said that on the same day of tear down video was released.

Not only that but the ps5 simpler design allows sony to churn out more units out of the factory thn ms with xbox.
 

BabyYoda

Banned
Said that on the same day of tear down video was released.

Not only that but the ps5 simpler design allows sony to churn out more units out of the factory thn ms with xbox.
The way it's put together looks more complex than the Series X to me, the actual innards themselves are cheaper though (except for the SSD), that much is true.
 
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