Quote Originally Posted by Warsaw View Post
What happened was Microsoft tried to cut corners by using ESRAM and some software foolery to try and get as much performance from their now proprietary SoC as Sony would get out of the reference AMD design though brute force. That would put them at performance parity until devs figured out how to maximize the usage of PS4's processing power. Microsoft wanted to save money on their end to increase profit margins and, if the competition required, to give them more room to undercut Sony on price. This is what I concluded when I read the AnandTech article breaking down the hardware differences of the two platforms back when the Xbone was announced.

Basically, the bean-counters fucked it up for engineering. I'm laughing so hard right now.
I dont even think it's that.
In their minds, the 360 was highly superior to any other console and PC.
To continue what they were doing seems like a good idea. The only thing they had to watch out for was heat so they wouldn't wind up with another RRODfest. I doubt it was even to cut costs since they had to specially engineer busses when they didn't really have to. GDDR5 is more expensive than DDR3, but not that much.
They accounted for that, but didn't think anything about the actual manufacturing process itself. After all, that's something that those manufacturing guys will work out right?
They just kind of flat out ignored the biggest reason why you continuously try to move to a smaller manufacturing process. By doubling the size of the chip, the likelihood of defects appearing on the architecture and not blank/unused space goes up dramatically.6