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Why aren't there game console-like PCs?
I don't mean the form factor. What I means is, you can buy a PlayStation 4 Pro for $400. Why can't you get that level of gaming performance for about that price? I get that Sony makes their money by taking a cut of game sales. But why can't you buy basically PlayStation 4 Pro level hardware running Windows 10 for $500?
A Chinese company named PlayRuyi apparently asked that same question, and the result was the Subor Z+. They commissioned a custom chip from AMD with 4 Zen cores, 24 Vega compute units, and 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, and then basically built a game console out of it. You can read some about it here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13381/subor-z-console-pc-hybrid-fireflight
Do you think that there would be a considerable market for something like that in the United States? That is, a fairly low budget PC (around $400-$500) optimized specifically for gaming, but still capable of doing the other things that you do on a normal PC rather than completely locked down like a game console. Considering how many game consoles sell, there might well be.
A Chinese company named PlayRuyi apparently asked that same question, and the result was the Subor Z+. They commissioned a custom chip from AMD with 4 Zen cores, 24 Vega compute units, and 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, and then basically built a game console out of it. You can read some about it here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13381/subor-z-console-pc-hybrid-fireflight
Do you think that there would be a considerable market for something like that in the United States? That is, a fairly low budget PC (around $400-$500) optimized specifically for gaming, but still capable of doing the other things that you do on a normal PC rather than completely locked down like a game console. Considering how many game consoles sell, there might well be.
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Comments
Comparing consoles to PCs is like comparing apples to oranges, of course...with low level programming, that gap has been closing, as for how much is to be seen. But PCs are always going to be superior in every way as long as you have the money for it.
The pros of a PC is you can upgrade only what you need, one of my nearly 8 year old PCs can perform better than a PS4 Pro with a simple graphic card upgrade while still retaining some of the older parts and can perform other functions. It becomes a matter of long term vs. short term investment.
At least that's my take on it.
It could even be locked down to gaming and I wouldn't mind. I don't use my gaming PC for anything else really.
And game consoles aren't nearly as special built of hardware as they used to. The PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, and Xbox One X all run off the shelf x86 CPU cores and a GCN/Polaris GPU--the same architectures you'd get in a PC. The Nintendo Switch runs a completely standard Tegra X1 that Nvidia had built for other purposes, with ARM cores like you'd get in any cell phone or tablet and a Maxwell GPU like you'd get in a PC, though that's a much lower performance target than what I had in mind here.
Just a guess...
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can certainly agree on that, the hardware gap is closing nowadays, but still...from a business standpoint and for arguments sake, $80 per unit isn't a whole lot in profit (if you're trying to maximize profit while running the potential risk of the platform it bombing altogether ala Steam Machines) especially if there's only one unit per household as opposed to the license cost from games (both physical and digital) and the volume sold per copy (remember, digital games don't have to be manufactured multiple times like a unit of hardware and can be duplicated on pennies to the dollar on physical media, which is how Sony makes money back on their hardware).
But yeah, I see it end up being a pretty risky business venture altogether.
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A Chinese company named PlayRuyi is doing exactly that, though for now, the plan is to sell it only in China. For a number of years now, AMD has been telling anyone who would listen that they'll do semi-custom parts of the sort that PlayRuyi ordered. Pick any CPU, GPU, memory controllers, or any other IP that AMD has, tell them how much of each you want in a chip, and they'll build it for you. Apparently PlayRuyi had to pay $60 million for the design of their custom chip. That's massively cheaper than it would cost to build a CPU or GPU architecture from scratch.
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And companies have failed in the past (Alienware and Asus) as well at building an affordable PC gaming box that delivers an experience that's acceptable to the user. I'm certainly not saying it won't/can't succeed and I can certainly see your point. I still see it boiling down to if there's a demand and market for it (this is being sold in China, I'm in the US). But I mean, this could all could change. Either way, competition is good for every consumer so I hope it does succeed and there is a resurgence of game centric PC boxes (Microsoft came out with one of the first few "tablets" way back when and it bombed, but look at things today).
Oh and about the console thing, I must have hastely read your post when I made that comment.
To approach profitability making a $400 console equivalent (think the XBox One X retails at $499) the price would - I am pretty sure - have to be higher than $500. And the higher the price the less they sell.
As the end price goes up so does the sales tax - which adds to the price the user pays; o/s cost; higher vendor margin for an "unknown" product - consoles will get lower vendor margins as the units will sell; if they make a profit they would have tax to pay - which the cost will need to account for. Lower volume discounts - MS and Sony must get a discount from AMD, both companies console orders accounted for 10% of AMDs revenue last year!
Lower volumes mean that the cost of design, testing, negotiating the contracts, marketing, establishing the assembly lines etc. etc has to be borne by fewer units. So lower margin. Vicious circle. MS and Sony both lost huge amounts of money initially.
If it was possible I think Dell, HP - even Google - would have done it by now.
Maybe it will happen eventually. Samsung? If they do release a pc gpu and add a more powerful Exynos cpu? Or maybe it will just happen as a result of tablets getting larger and more powerful.
Thank you for putting things in words I was trying to find but couldn't, lol.
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Now, when the PS4 was created, AMD didn't have a good CPU architecture and Intel didn't have a good integrated GPU. The game consoles went with AMD's low power, low performance Jaguar cores; you can readily thread games to use many CPU cores if you know that you need to, but a lot of legacy PC software didn't. Intel still doesn't have a good GPU, but AMD now does have a good CPU to pair with a decent GPU.
Thus, the possibility to do what PlayRuyi is doing now is relatively recent. I'm pretty sure that Alienware and Asus haven't tried it before; if they have, I'd like to see a link. But why is some Chinese company that no one had ever heard of before the only one trying to do this?
I hope it sells well enough that either they decide to sell it beyond China or else other companies decide to copy the approach.
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Microsoft and Sony surely do get a per-unit discount from AMD, but that's compensation for having paid the up front development costs of the hardware, meaning that AMD is guaranteed to make a profit on developing the consoles without regard to whether Microsoft or Sony buy many chips or few.
As for the "if it was possible" line, have you ever looked at prebuilt desktops or laptops? The hardware configurations are completely insane. For example, it's been possible for many years to include a $100 SSD in a sub-$1000 laptop, but laptop vendors couldn't be bothered to do so until recently.
Most PC enthusiasts expect to spend more and get much better power, performance, etc. than you'd find in a streamlined ComSole.
If people are going to choose between spending $500 on:
A) A Playstation, etc.
C) A lower end gaming-PC
... PC will come up short in the majority of users' cases.
Ironically, even though we are closer to having a blended market, this just makes the need for a PC become less important, too. Now that consoles have TV/movie streaming, marketplaces built-in, etc., there's not a lot of incentive to pick a comsole over a regular console, unless you need a PC for reasons other than entertainment. And, when you need a PC for other reasons, you probably aren't going to want a system focused on budget gaming.
It's like a blind spot in the market, certainly, but it's been neglected for a reason, imo.
I guess, putting it in simplest terms, I'm asking, "Does such a niche area of the market really seem worth it for such low per-sale profitability?"
Edit: I wanted to also mention costs of shipping and returns, etc. Chances are, a company like this would be hit much, much harder with the blowback of returns and shipping costs, particularly since you wouldn't likely find one of these products 'on the shelf', so to speak.