this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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276
Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by j4p@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
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"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.

But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."

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[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 67 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

It’s not that they’re not improving like they used to, it’s that the die can’t shrink any more.

Price cuts and “slim” models used to be possible due to die shrinks. A console might have released on 100nm, and then a process improvement comes out that means it can be made on 50nm, meaning 2x as many chips on a wafer and half the power usage and heat generation. This allowed smaller and cheaper revisions.

Now that the current ones are already on like 4nm, there’s just nowhere to shrink to.

[–] SirEDCaLot 10 points 1 week ago

This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let's not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

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