transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:26] And welcome to Broken Silicon, a gaming hardware podcast. I am your host, Tom. Today's lead sponsors are cdkeyoffer.com, where you can get Windows 11 Professional for just $24 with offer code brokensilicon, and then MINISFORUM and their new X1 Lite line of mini PCs. Save $30 on those, also with offer code brokensilicon. Dan, how are you doing?

Speaker 2:
[00:49] Pretty good, I suppose. Survived, I'm not sure if this made national news. Probably did the onslaught that Wisconsin received over the last week. So, three tornado warnings in one week was a new one for me.

Speaker 1:
[01:08] Yeah, I'll also...

Speaker 2:
[01:10] Oh, and I sent you like an image too of like, this was just images of people on like Reddit, like posting hail. Like there was like legit tennis ball size hail, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 1:
[01:22] Yeah, forward that to me again, so I can have Gerard show that. But I'll also show what our mom sent us from Minnesota, which is in southern Minnesota, just insane pictures of tornadoes. It's crazy up there right now for you guys. It has been 80 degrees and sunny here, or actually 65 and sunny today. So, I guess eat it, loser. I don't know how else to end.

Speaker 2:
[01:45] Well, it's nice out today. Perfect day for me to be working all day.

Speaker 1:
[01:51] For you to be working in a lab for 12 hours and then recording a podcast, yes. I mean, besides that, I know before we started recording, you asked how I was doing, because I've been sick all week. I said, well, we can't deprive people of the amazing content.

Speaker 2:
[02:05] Amazing, I'm sick, Ted.

Speaker 1:
[02:06] Your live reactions to me telling you that I'm not that sick anymore. Riveting stuff. I might sniffle a little bit. I'll try to mute myself, but that's the only thing I can say, is that that might happen. It's, yeah, I mean, I've managed to get the videos out. A lot of the things are performing very well, I will say, this week on the channel, so that's all good, but.

Speaker 2:
[02:29] I don't think we'll ever outdo me. I think it was me during the COVID episode that we recorded probably a year and a half ago, where I had to mute myself like six or seven times, because I was active, one episode, I actively had COVID while we recorded.

Speaker 1:
[02:49] Yeah, when you just started talking, I was like, wait, what's he gonna say? I don't remember, and then the amount of times you had to stop, it was, or mute yourself, it's like, oh, I do actually remember that, I do.

Speaker 2:
[02:59] Yes, yes, that was a rough one, but we made it through.

Speaker 1:
[03:04] Now, would that have been right after we were going to go to Ireland, and then you got COVID, and instead, we stayed in the layover I did in North Carolina, and decided to stay there for a few days. Was that that time?

Speaker 2:
[03:17] That was during Christmas. Just before Christmas, I should say.

Speaker 1:
[03:22] That's right, because you got it twice then, right?

Speaker 2:
[03:23] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[03:24] Very fun. I don't, oh, I see I vaguely remember that, because I'm like, that couldn't have been like a week after you got it that first time, because the first time you got it, I don't think you were ready to record for a while there.

Speaker 2:
[03:37] Nope.

Speaker 1:
[03:38] It was pretty, I remember we were calling you in the car and it was, I don't know if I've ever heard you sound that sick. You're like, hey.

Speaker 2:
[03:49] Yeah, COVID's a fun illness, but hopefully we don't ever have to get it again, Tom.

Speaker 1:
[03:55] Yes, hopefully not. Although, I don't know if I bet on that, but let us move on to the corrections here. Jensen Wang, Real Gamers Love DLSS5 writes in, it says, maybe Wikipedia is wrong. I mean, I guess it's not perfect, but Infamous, they say, launched the 26th of May in 2009, then Prototype launched the 9th of June. So what would that be? A week? Two weeks after it or so.

Speaker 2:
[04:18] Two-ish weeks.

Speaker 1:
[04:19] In that same year. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, you're probably a little off on this one. So he didn't, I wish, Jensen, you would have clarified. Let me say this, too. I wish we would get more corrections, maybe because we've been doing this for so long, we're just never wrong anymore. I don't know. But like, if you're in the Moore's Law Is Dead Discord, you submit, as long as they're not pedantic corrections, if we like, oh, I said something large this time, I said this was the performance increase with this architecture 10 years ago, I was off. We would like more of those, but if you do, please say what I was wrong about, just to clarify. Now, I assume what he's getting at is I, on a recent stream, or was it the, I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[04:59] I think it was the last Dice Shrink we recorded. Maybe you talked about it again on the most recent live stream, but.

Speaker 1:
[05:05] I probably did twice, but like I talked about how exclusives can cause more competition by creating vacuums on some platforms where they're forced to compete. Like Killzone, I do believe even though it never was a Halo killer, was picked up by Sony to bring a first person shooter to PS2 to compete. And I don't know if we would have gotten some of my favorite games, Killzone 2 and 3, had it not been for Halo and Sony needing to compete with that. And then also you look at, I said my prototype feels very much so like bringing an infamous like game to PC and XBOX. That's why Activision did that. So he's saying these launched within two weeks of each other. This couldn't have been made to compete with that. And I would say, I mean, yes, this could just be parallel thinking. But I don't know. I mean, look, Infamous would have been in development for years. There's nothing stopping Activision from seeing that and going, Oh, but that will be exclusive. We should make something at the same time. So other people buy it on Xbox. This happens in the movie industry all the time. There's copycat movies that come out at the same time. And this isn't quite the same thing.

Speaker 2:
[06:06] Like, multiple Hercules movies in a year.

Speaker 1:
[06:09] Or there's also parallel thinking. For some reason, we needed three Hercules movies in a year. Yeah. I mean, so, or conversely, like they could also be, this was going to come out later in 2009. And then they accelerate the development because they're like, this has to come out closer to Infamous because we don't want Infamous to have been there for a year. And also, there's another prototype and another Infamous that came out. And so, I still think there's something there where they kept it going because of that. Now, do I think they just saw Infamous and made it in two weeks? No, but do you think I'm wrong to suggest that this is still an example of filling a vacuum, right?

Speaker 2:
[06:47] I mean, if I'm remembering correctly, I was the one that brought up prototype. And I do specifically remember prototype coming out very close to Infamous. And I guess maybe the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Wang, thought...

Speaker 1:
[07:03] Which is, of course, the actual CEO right now.

Speaker 2:
[07:05] Yes. Maybe thought like I was trying to insinuate that like it was quickly made in response to Infamous, which I guess I didn't say, which wasn't my point. I mean, the reason it even came to mind is I specifically remember like school, I started conversations when I was a kid about like, well, prototypes coming up and prototypes basically Infamous. So I mean, if you told me that there was absolutely no connection other than like the advertising, maybe, I would believe you. But like, yeah, there's also the possibility that like these companies all know what each other is working on. And maybe that, like you said, this was brought up earlier, there was a big advertising push to compete with Infamous. Or like you said, maybe those sequels ended up getting made because of the comparisons that were made to Infamous.

Speaker 1:
[08:06] Or again, maybe this was a development. They saw Infamous was coming out during that summer and they said, oh, we need to make sure this launches at the same time so that XBOX gamers have something they can buy at the same time if they see that and they want something similar. I don't think we should back down from thinking of that. That is a thing. And a good example of, I gave the Killzone example. I just want to say, we're not saying exclusives are always good, but guys, Forza was really pushed hard because XBOX needed a Gran Turismo competitor. And because of that, we have Forza Horizon, we have the Forza games, and a lot of people say they're better.

Speaker 2:
[08:47] So I think most people at this point would say Forza is better.

Speaker 1:
[08:49] And some people say they're better. So Gran Turismo, being an exclusive, actually created a better racing game that competed with it. And that is some of the positives of exclusives. Right. But you know, this is perfect. I will take this as an opportunity to plug the newest die shrink. It's over an hour long. It's basically a bonus Broken Silicon, where me and you do a deep dive on the economics behind exclusives, and like why they can't actually make more money than going multi-plat, because there's been this assumption for a while that you have to be or you should go multi-plat unless you just want to make less money to get people to buy your console because you'll always make more money. It always makes better business sense to put your game on every single device and all of these rumors coming up from like Jason Schreier, a little bit kind of from me, but other people out there as well. We'll talk about this later in the episode, are pointing to Sony thinking it doesn't make business sense to go on other thing, other devices besides PlayStation or at least not prioritize being multi-plat as much. What's interesting is I think a lot of people are missing this. It's not just about getting you to buy a PS6. I think there's evidence they're making less money because they're on Xbox, or I should say on PC really. I don't want to regurgitate the whole conversation. It's spawned endless discussions, I will say, in the Moore's Law Is Dead Discord. Every other thread in the Moore's Law Is Dead Discord right now is people talking about exclusives and where they make money, where they don't. So if this is something that interests you, join the Patreon. I've decided I release one of the die shrinks into the Essentials catalog for the $1 tier every month. When this comes out, this will be in the Essentials catalog. I believe this episode deserves to be there. So just join us at the $1 tier. You can ask guest questions and listen to that as well. But I do have one new piece of information that I'd be remiss if I didn't put this in this episode before we get into the story. So it's very interesting, right? So again, the notion is maybe like games like Hell Divers 2 makes sense to be on a bunch of platforms. It's multiplayer. You want more people to play with. It's also intrinsically codes, not all PlayStation. Everyone wants a Starship Troopers game on every platform. You know, that makes sense to me. Like you would, but no, Hell Divers 2 launched day and date on Steam and on PlayStation. And because of that, the hype was universal on all platforms. Word of mouth spread, you know, very quickly and exponentially between people, no matter what platform they were on. I think that is starting to be what Sony's realizing is that when it comes to exclusives, you got to launch them day one or don't launch them on PC at all, both because the audience there may not want your exclusive as much as you thought they did, but also because if it doesn't come out on day one, all of the hype's gone by the time it comes to PC. And if you think about what that means, you know, this is something me and you discuss a lot, like a Death Stranding 2 comes out, everyone's excited. I was everywhere. Like, I mean, everyone's like, is this what PS6 will look like? I mean, it's just, it was hype, hype, hype, hype, hype. And then whatever it was, six months a year later, it comes to PC and what happens? No, not nearly as many people are talking about it. And in fact, it's now competing with games that should have been competing with a year prior or six months prior. It's now competing with newer games like Resident Evil 9. That's a problem because now people will buy the newer game because your game feels older and the hype is gone. And I put out a poll today on the Moore's Law Is Dead YouTube channel, which if I look, yeah, it's gotten thousands of submissions. This is a lot of data, actually. I asked the question, and Gerard can put this on screen now, have you ever skipped or further delayed buying a PlayStation PC release because your hype for it had dissipated by the time it finally came to PC, or you chose to buy a truly newer release instead? And you know, I'm always a little worried to disprove my own theories when I put out polls, but the evidence is damning in support of my theory. 50% of you said you've done this. So understand what this means, everybody. That means 50, like if this was, and I think the Moore's Law Is Dead community is actually a pretty good group of people to poll, because they're mostly PC, but maybe console curious compared to an all PC or an all console channel. These are the gettable buyers that Sony is looking for specifically. Half of you said that you've not bought a game, because by the time it came out, it felt old. And I'll speak for myself. I remember seeing Ghost of Tsushima come to PC, and I believe it was $70. And I'm like, what? This is like a $30 game on PlayStation right now. Why would you get this set for a three-year-old game for $70 and sales were not good on PC apparently. That's why Ghost of Yotai is not coming to PC. This business model doesn't make sense. And you know, it's even more damning. And so this evidence suggests that Sony is losing millions of sales because if you told them you have to get a PlayStation, they might have just gotten one. Or if it would came out on PC on the same time, they would have bought it. The hype cycles missed, people don't buy it. But also over a third of you said, no, I usually wait three plus years after to buy a game anyways. Think about what that means. So Sony is spending all of this money to port a game to PC. It might actually literally be losing them sales because people say they'll wait to buy it, but then they don't because it's not new and it finally gets to PC. But then the people who do end up buying it pay $10 for it years later, instead of perhaps buying it on PlayStation. So I think this is proof. This is why Sony is going to make more exclusives next gen. It is not just because of the architecture. It is not just because they want you to buy PS6. I think it's because they have data like this that shows they're actually losing sales on some games.

Speaker 2:
[14:44] Yeah, and I would say the counterfactual or alternate also could be that day and date releases. I think this is still mostly consistent. Like if they did everything day and date, which I don't think Sony wants to do, I think you could still interpret this to mean like, well, this doesn't necessarily mean that Sony should massively go back exclusives, like maybe the alternate interpretation is, well, Sony should go ham on making everything multiplat, do everything, or if they're going to do anything multiplat, do it day and date. I'm not sure. I think the argument against that is they still have to dedicate more resources to porting it to PC and supporting it on PC, and if there's not that pre-hyped user base there on PC versus PlayStation, maybe it's just not worth it in the first place. But you know, I think that's the big alternate interpretation of this, that, I mean, I'm not really sure how you would gauge that question. The thing I hate, I don't know if polling would provide an very accurate result to that, because I think the way people respond to polls a lot, like when asked a hypothetical, you'll end up getting what they think they do, or the responses they want to hear rather than their actual behavior. Where here, I mean, I would hope that seeing a poll like this, most of the people responding are actually just responding based on prior behavior, you know?

Speaker 1:
[16:34] Yeah. And I also want to clarify too, because this is where I think you, I'm at risk of people saying, Tom's just wants all games on PlayStation, he's a Sony pony, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I'm actually making two arguments at the same time. I'm arguing there are games that probably lost money or at least wasted a dev's time. Like maybe they could have started working on a sequel a year sooner, whatever, saved money in long-term tail support, but like it doesn't just mean like, oh, they made 5% more money. It's like, okay, well, if you made even five, like that's nothing versus all the support in the time you spent putting it on other platforms, I am making that argument, but I'm also making the argument that a lot of these games should just be day one on every platform. Like I'm looking at, and so that's really a pro multi-platform argument. I'm making both. I'm saying more games should be day and date on everything from Sony, and more games should probably be exclusives because they were never going to make more money on the other platforms, and they're wasting devs' times. Maybe we would get more sequels in one console gen from one studio if we weren't trying to support and import all this stuff. If you don't like that, I'm sorry, but it's like we also get more games. We got more games during the PS360 era. When I look at the games they're working on, like Seros, that's a Housemarque exclusive. Look, I don't know, maybe that should just be on PlayStation. Intergalactic, probably just on PlayStation. Marathon, day and date, and I believe it was on everything. Horizon Cooperative, that's a co-op online game. Day and date should be on everything. It shouldn't have any exclusivity period on. 007, probably day and date on everything, I would assume. But I'm saying it just needs to go one or the other back and forth, and that's what I think we'll see next-gen.

Speaker 2:
[18:08] Yeah, I do think the more I think about this is like, I think Sony's strategy is like, it's very incoherent and all over the place. And I think the way they've been doing their multi-platform releases just generates a lot of, like, anxiety, not anxiety, but like, like there's so much unpredictability to it that I don't think like people know how to gauge where or when to buy a Sony exclusive. And like that might, like you said, talking about like a hype cycle that dies down, I mean, maybe there are, I assume there's a decent number of people that are both PlayStation and PC gamers that are like, okay, well, I want to decide when I pick and choose which games I get on which thing, you know, based on performance or whatever. And then seeing like it not come to PC immediately, maybe some of those people choose not to buy it immediately and wait for the PC release, then they just forget about it. Because, I mean, frankly, like, what's one of those like before? Yeah, I mean, what's one of those disgust thing on like gaming subreddits or gaming forums? It's like, how big your backlog is and how many people actually end up getting to their backlog, let alone games that are in their quote unquote backlog that they haven't bought yet, you know?

Speaker 1:
[19:42] Exactly. And so, I don't know. I just, I came up with a good example too, of like, you know, look at Hook, look at Horizon Forbidden West. Now, technically that got double screwed, if I remember correctly or something, because it kept launching next to other games that compete directly with Horizon. But you know, that launched next to Elden Ring. And then if you're on PC, you didn't get it right away. And I believe it launched next to the Elden Ring expansion pack when it came to PC. And it's like, so yeah, you just got the Elden Ring expansion pack and ignored Horizon Forbidden West. Like launching these games, like half a year to a year later, I just objectively think is a failed business model. I put out a short about that. People can check out as well from the die shrink. It's just, it failed. And so again, we go into what we think about that a lot more in a die shrink. But let's move on here. You get access to that. And I actually moved the story around, Dan. I'm like, why in the world are we going to go to this other story later? Let's just move this up and make it story number one. We're already on the conversation. Nip this in the butt here. So story number one, PlayStation and Xbox exclusives coming back, quoting from Bloomberg and then Tweak Town. Sony Corp Group no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC. Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokan will still be released across multiple platforms. But it seems like single player titles such as last year, Samurai Hit, Ghost of Yotai and the upcoming action game Seros remain exclusive to PlayStation. So the people who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about the company. And then like I said, here's Tweaktown. Sources behind the scenes have told Windows Central journalist and Xbox expert Jez Corden that Microsoft is at least discussing Xbox exclusives. But whether or not new game CEO Asha Sharma will order more exclusivity next gen remains to be seen. And so yeah, with Sony exclusives are set to possibly make a comeback next generation. With Sony it makes complete sense. There won't really be PC hardware with the mix capabilities that Orion and Canis will have outside of Helix. And since Sony wants to use AI to produce truly novel game features, most likely at least, the barrier there will be even higher to running on other platforms since those models would have to be ported and that alone can be very difficult, at least for the first few years of the generation. Now the suggestion of Xbox exclusives, this seems to be a weaker argument though. Unlike Sony, Xbox is a vanity project with very little trend power in the console market. Helix exclusives don't really make that much sense therefore, but Windows and Xbox Store exclusives could. After all, it wouldn't be Microsoft's first attempt to monopolize Windows app sales. Yet more good news for console gamers though, either way, exclusives means that more of the hardest potential will be used. But PC gamers, well, they'll face a hard question once again, like they have in previous gens. Whether to buy at least a cheap Canis box or to forgo finishing the Horizon trilogy, which is just a random example. Definitely not Carbon Cry's current deep existential dilemma. Meaning it probably is. But yeah, so we're already on the conversation, so I thought we'd just get to this story here, which expands it into just the greater thought of maybe Xbox having more exclusives as well. Like I said, we did a whole die shrink about it, but I mean, Cliff Notes or any further thoughts on this possibly happening.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] Most of my thoughts on the positives, I guess I feel like we've already covered in the-

Speaker 1:
[23:05] The appetizer.

Speaker 2:
[23:06] In the- Sure, the appetizer to the- The hors d'oeuvres to this story. But, you know, I just do want to like, I don't know, throw this idea out there. And it's a thing we discussed a lot on the die shrink. And maybe I'm more of a contrarian on this like, anti-consumer, like, gamer's thing, because of like, what happened with Zipper Interactive, if you remember, where Zipper hyper listened to fan feedback on things, and it destroyed the company. I think fans a lot of the time just like, say random BS online, and like, don't actually consider like, what's good and bad for the market more broadly. And just like, I think this anti-consumer, this anti-consumer high people have been on since 2020, it has gotten a little bit out of hand to where like, everything is viewed as anti-consumer, even if like, you're not really considering.

Speaker 1:
[24:17] Or, journalists and influencers try to sell every story as some anti-consumer moment for clicks, let's be honest.

Speaker 2:
[24:24] Yeah, like, I think it's gotten a little bit boneheaded at this point, and I don't know, maybe if you're going to like, scream the anti-consumer thing, consider what you're talking about a little bit more. Like, I think very strong periods of gaming are clearly linked to a lot of exclusives being around. And, you know, if you want to build a case like, against that take, like, I mean, maybe you could argue that that's a coincidence, but I think like, what we talked about in the Die Shrink, there's clearly some level of, there's clearly some causative element to it. Maybe it's not all of it, I don't know. But I think exclusives, at a minimum, can have a benefit to the market, even if there are versions of exclusives that we talked about that, like, we don't like. Like, I think third party, actually, I shouldn't say third party exclusives, because third party exclusives, if they're funded, funded or developed by the, like Sony or Microsoft, can end up good. Like, I don't think, like, deprived, timed or bought exclusives really benefit anything.

Speaker 1:
[25:31] Like, Bayonetta 2 wouldn't exist unless Nintendo financed it to exist.

Speaker 2:
[25:34] Exactly. And I don't know, like, Bioshock being paid for exclusive for, like, nine months or whatever, I don't really see how that benefits the market, but yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:47] Right. We are delineating between arbitrary exclusives and Sony funds Demon's Souls because they want a hardcore RPG for the Japanese market and wouldn't exist and the Nelden Ring might not exist were it not for exclusives. Like, yeah, I mean, and you know, let me say this too, it's like to the people that are like, oh, well, I hated when I had to buy a PS3 for this or a 360 to play that. You know, a lot of those games, there was a competitor offering on that other console as well that was oftentimes pretty good. Just think about the, don't think about the games that you'll have to buy another box for. It's just consider, are there entire games on your chosen box that you wouldn't have gotten were enough for that? You know, I don't know. And again, I'm not saying I'm advocating for tons of exclusives next gen. I am saying there's clear business evidence out there that it does not always make sense to be multi-plat. One and number two, there's also clear evidence that the best eras in gaming is when there was more competition, ergo more exclusives, where companies were funding these innovation attempts against each other. And don't you want that? Like everyone's, everything's the same. Everything's boring. It's like, well, it's cause everyone makes the same thing and it has to work on every device and it has to target every market and every type of person. It can't focus on one niche type of gamer or this type of, you know, gamer that has a big following on PlayStation or this one that has like a big shooter following on XBOX because they need to be as broad as, well, that's why everything's becoming so samey, guys.

Speaker 2:
[27:13] Yeah, and like I also think like, like I said earlier, I think the way Sony has been doing exclusivity just kind of doesn't make any sense. Like really, the way you think about it. And I don't necessarily think the way XBOX is as they're the party that's a lot more on the back foot. I suppose doing more considerations of multi-platform releases might make more sense for them. But if they want to pull back from that and actually try to earnestly push XBOX as a big brand again, I think doing a lot of their releases, or all of their releases even as Windows slash XBOX exclusives, and maybe even considering targeting some exclusives just to the Helix next generation, like should the hardware necessitate that, I suppose, like would kind of make sense.

Speaker 1:
[28:04] Right. And I guess this is the final thing I want to talk about before we move on to the second story. Which is, right, all most of our exclusives talk next gen. It's really around PS6, because we all get what that means. It's going to be like Nintendo. You can only, you have to buy their console to play it, whatever. With XBOX, I do think there probably will be exclusives, but I really do think it's probably a Microsoft Store exclusive.

Speaker 2:
[28:27] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:28] And what they will say is built for, you know, the way they'll probably market it is they'll be like, I don't know, Halo 8, you know, and it says built for Helix or best on Helix. And it's because it was built from the ground up using their new development GDK, which I've done a whole video about explaining why their GDK that they've already unveiled for XBOX Helix is clearly built like they're going to kind of have exclusives. Making me think, and that was a conclusion I made in that video and a conclusion I ran past some developers who agreed, like it just seems like they do plan to have some kind of pseudo exclusives next gen. Like that is very easy to do. They can just say built for Helix, it's built in the first part of the pipeline from the ground up to run well on Helix. And then they port it, which is very little work from what I've seen in the documents they've released to Windows Store, and anyone can play it. But it'll be like, just keep in mind, this was built from the ground up for like a console with a Gen 5 NVMe SSD or something, and like whatever amount of teraflops, whatever amount of tops, GPU that AT2 will be, you know. This was built for something that's like 4090 performance in some ways. And, you know, just understand that that's what this was built from the ground up to run like at 4K64. And so if you buy it and you just use like some Nvidia GPU, it's not as optimized for it and whatever, but it is on PC and you can play it like usual on PC. I, at this point, I bet money there's going to be a lot of games like that and they will be talked about kind of in the same way as an exclusive. They won't be on PS6 most likely.

Speaker 2:
[30:08] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[30:09] So you agree, though, that they would probably do that and they would probably skip putting it on PS6, at least for some of these games.

Speaker 2:
[30:15] Yeah, I mean, at a minimum, I think PS6 releases for at least the beginning of the generation would probably be pretty limited for Microsoft, or non-existent. And I could see them re-evaluating that strategy if Helix, or Helix at all, like all the changes that they're going to make along with the release of the Helix. If that doesn't pan out and they can't gain a strong foothold in the market again, I could see them re-evaluating and trying to put more stuff on PS6 afterwards. But yeah, at least for the first, I don't know, couple, maybe three years of the generation, wouldn't surprise me at all.

Speaker 1:
[30:59] Yeah, and so I think we should move on now. But one thing that I do want to close the story out with is something that I keep bringing up basically anytime we talk about XBOX Helix, and I'm not going to stop bringing it up. If you are a journalist or someone with a public platform that ever interviews or has frequent public facing or conversations with representatives at Microsoft, ask them if it runs Steam. Ask them if it runs Steam. They have not said it runs on Steam. Everyone runs Steam on the Helix. Everyone's saying it does. But I want them to say it explicitly because they still have not confirmed it. And I'm concerned about a surprise coming there for some people that it either doesn't run Steam or if it does, you've got to jump through a couple of hoops to boot it up and they'll kind of try to keep you away from it while you're running Helix.

Speaker 2:
[31:51] Yeah. I mean, we are talking about this as the console or constant all the time, but like wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft at this point, like based on how the landscape has changed, if they kind of use Steam as more their big potential competitor going forward versus Sony.

Speaker 1:
[32:13] Right.

Speaker 2:
[32:14] Yeah. Or they're both competitors.

Speaker 1:
[32:17] Are sleeping on that. The real competition is the Steam Machine guys, and actually this might be built as a Steam Machine killer. Again, that's what I openly put in the thumbnail of the video where I analyzed their Helix unveiling. But all right. Let us now move on to the second story here, which is story number two. This spring, Jessie, like many Belgian Melanoise, is starting her own logging company outside. And I gotta say, watching her do this, it's bizarre. It's almost as weird as someone paying full price for Microsoft Office or operating systems, and that is why this piece of content is brought to you by cdkeyoffer.com. That's right, once again, the longest running sponsor actually of Moore's Law Is Dead, cdkeyoffer.com is sponsoring this piece of content. And that's because I just think it's something that should be out there, something that our community should always know about, and that is reasonably priced Microsoft keys and also deals on different pieces of software, like games as well, on their website. Now, if you're interested in supporting Moore's Law Is Dead and thus supporting a sponsor that supports Moore's Law Is Dead, go to cdkeyoffer.com through the link below. Just clicking on that link helps a ton. But then if you do go there and want to buy something, make sure you use offer code BROKEN SILICON to save 25% on all Microsoft software and DyeShrink to save 3% off everything else on the website. Again, they've been a great sponsor this whole time. I love working with them. It's easy to work with them, and they provide a service I think this community needs, reasonably priced Microsoft keys. So support Moore's Law Is Dead by checking out cdkeyoffer.com today. Clearing up recent next-gen console DoomerMaxing. So, a bit of a theme developed through March and into April. A lot of people were panicking that the next-gen consoles would get delayed into 2029 in cost of fortune. The other part of the theme resulted in us feeling the need to publish multiple videos, podcasts and live streams to push back against these pessimistic ideas and clear up misconceptions. So let's go through all the things that this channel's been working to clear up over the past month. First of all, let's quickly start with the delays. We see no evidence for them. And really, it doesn't make much sense. PS6 therefore is still launching late 2027 or maybe early 2028, but delaying it more than that would cost Sony far more money than taking it on the chin from Sky Hey Ram prices for the first years of the PS6's life. This was covered in the February loose ends where I found that even if they were to buy all of their components right now, the peak worst time to buy PC components, and they won't, they'll buy them when they're cheaper with negotiated contracts than probably a year from now, they would still probably be able to keep it under 1,000. So the $1,000 price point, at least for the PS6, I believe is ridiculous, and behind the scenes there's no evidence it's being delayed. In fact, they're taking more and more steps behind the scenes right now to make PS5 games ready for PS6 handheld proactively before the dev kits have even shipped. This was covered in my PlayStation Foundation League. Yes, it will be backwards compatible, by the way, making this is another thing I cleared up. This was a key feature of Sony's SDKs from the start of the PS5, and I leaked proof of this, proof from a snapshot of a document that said, Canis backwards compatibility to PS4 and PS5, and cross compatibility with PS6. Again, I had to clear this up during the episode when Colin was on because I keep getting comments, does the PS6 handheld run PS6 games? To which my answer is usually, it's a PS6. You just ask me, does the PS6 run PS6 games? And like, does it run PS4 games? It's a PSX, yes, it will run PS4 games. So that doc's now out there confirming it as well. Now anyways, moving on here, what's even more of a cause for optimism though is how much better PS6 and Helix will be. Helix is basically a high-end PC, even using the same silicon as AMD's 70 or maybe 80 class RDNA 5 GPUs. It isn't an ultra level of PC hardware, but still far more power than consoles usually have. It will have the biggest APU in console history. I think it's over 400, I think it is, millimeters squared or something insane, of three nanometer. So if Helix has a PC mode, it could become a similarly deceptive product to the mid to the high-end pre-builds, as Macbook Neo has been for cheap laptops. Yes, it will be expensive for a console, but guys, if it's even $1,200, it's like a $2,000, $3,000 gaming PC. That's disruptive. And PS6 even canis again promise huge gains, especially in AI and ray tracing. And yes, they will be huge gains that some games will realize. It's just about design priorities in which ratio of raster AI and ray tracing performance is desired by a given dev. And now I unfortunately have to clear up some nonsense that happened on Friday as well, because KeplerL2 on Twitter is just openly lying about what I'm saying. And it's weird, clearly for attention. And I have a few slides that Gerard can put on screen while I'm talking now. So the first one is Kepler basically keeps saying that I think a 10% increase, for example, in ray tracing performance, which is what I've technically said for PS6 is 6 to 12 times, because that's what Sony's documents say, 6 to 12 times increase over PS5 in ray tracing. Why 6 to 12? Well, because even in highly ray traced games, some of them get a bigger gain than other ones, depending on the engine. So anyways, though, but let's just say 10 times or something. Like he keeps saying that that means that like Spider-Man will run it like 1200 frames per second. And that is not how this works and not something I ever said. So I put out a tweet saying, I don't mean this at all. And if you're doubting a 10 times increase in ray tracing performance, XBOX just confirmed this publicly that RDNA5 brings a massive leap. So I thought that would be that. And then I, but then I decided to put out, you know, another tweet meticulously basically explaining what I've already explained in my XBOX Helix and my PS6 ray tracing video where I'm like, I'm not saying all games will do this. I'm just saying, like, if you say a 10, a claimed ray tracing increase can't give you a linear performance increase of that much. It can. RDNA4 claimed a doubling of ray tracing performance for RDNA3, and most games, though, are not fully bottlenecked at ray tracing. But a game like Alan Wake 2 Path Tracing on AMD is. And if you look, it over doubled the ray tracing performance. That's a doubling of ray tracing. And it's like, that's because the bottleneck was entirely in the ray tracing pipeline, right? And so doubling ray tracing performance did literally double performance. But if you read my tweet, and I'll have Gerard, this is the Kepler nonsense 2 slide, Gerard, this should be on screen the whole time. If you read what I say here, I take time multiple places to say in some games the bottleneck isn't ray tracing, it won't get that performance increase. And I say, anyone who actually the PS6 can't in some scenarios get this performance uplift. So I'm over and over and over saying some scenarios, theoretical. And Kepler's response is PS6 will run Spider-Man 2 at 720 frames per second. That's not what I said, like at all. It makes no sense. He got ratio pretty badly too on this because I don't know what he's trying to prove or why he needs this attention so badly to just put words in my mouth. But I mean, I want people to see this on screen here, what I said and then what he said. And I know most of the people attacking me never actually read a single word I say and just try to hate on me, but people need to see this. This is hugely unprofessional. This is ridiculous. This is complete straw manning, putting words in people's mouths to try to make some point. And I don't know why, because when you go looking...

Speaker 2:
[40:10] I believe we call this... The Internet kids call this a crash out, Tom, on Twitter.

Speaker 1:
[40:17] I mean, I don't know why. Well, because I've often even recently been friendly with Tripp Kepler and I don't know why he's crashing out over this. It makes no sense. And now you have people debating if Spider-Man 2 will run at 720 frames per second. So he's just confusing people. And Kepler, a word, most of the people backing you up on Twitter are people that clearly are XBOX fanboys or don't get your argument. Like these are people that do not understand anything and you're starting to become the guy they quote a lot. Is that a good idea? Now, then I forgot I even said this because I don't remember like exact wording of what I say like a year ago, but now I'm not going to touch his name, Joe Biden's stand though tweeted, quoting me what I said in my PlayStation 6 video. Is this a direct one of what I said in it? When I say something like PS6 is 6-12 times ray tracing of PS5, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a 12 times in a performance in a ray traced game, like you boot up Spider-Man on PS5, it gets whatever frame rate, you're not just going to get 12 times that FPS. There could be isolated scenarios where that does happen, and I give an example of that, but the same specs, like it has better architecture, that's why that would happen. Many games like Doom Eternal, you got a 78% increase, not a doubling, so it just depends on how heavily ray traced the game is. So literally, going back to Slide, to Gerard Kepler nonsense too, literally, the example he gives, you heard it here first, PS6 will run Spider-Man 2 at 720 FPS, in the video he's quoting that says I say that, I say the opposite.

Speaker 2:
[41:55] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:56] What the f**k is going on, guys?

Speaker 2:
[41:58] Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much to, like...

Speaker 1:
[42:03] I'm only doing this because I have to, people. Guys, I make money, Dan makes money, Gerard makes money, Carbon Cry, John Philippe, the renderer for the channel, make money off of this. That means we have a reputation to protect. That's why we're spending time on this. We'll be done very soon. But you guys need to send links of this to him. You need to at Kepler and show these slides that this isn't what we said, because this is very unprofessional. And I'm sorry, the community should demand better than this. There should not be articles written about some being debunked that I never said.

Speaker 2:
[42:35] Yeah, I mean, I don't know. At the end of the day, he is a guy with a knight holding a sword on Twitter. I mean, at a certain point, what's this expectation? I guess he would say there should be no expectation of professionalism, because I don't know what he does this for at a certain point. But yeah, a lot of these people that really just, I don't know, are big... Twitter is such a weird platform. Like these big Twitter accounts that all they do is post stuff on Twitter and their entirety of their social media following is on Twitter. And a lot of these anonymous leaker Twitter accounts are kind of just, I don't know, people that throw shit randomly for no reason.

Speaker 1:
[43:27] And it's weird, it's such a weird...

Speaker 2:
[43:30] Like, I don't know if he was just in a bad mood and felt like starting a fight, or if he like said something, realized it sounded stupid and is now doubling down because he's trying to like save, or he's trying to like avoid the argument in some way.

Speaker 1:
[43:43] But when he said the PS6 uses RDNA1, and then he tried to double down on that and got ratioed. So this is a person that's done this before. This is a person that told you RDNA3 would be four times the performance of RDNA2. That's the people, this is the person you're quoting for advice on next-gen performance, everybody. The guy that told you RDNA3 would quadruple RDNA2 performance, and I got so much shit for constantly slapping that down.

Speaker 2:
[44:08] Yeah. Well, I don't know. I guess the reply to that is where is the, what, the 600 FPS in whatever game on RDNA3? Like, I don't know. Yeah, it's stupid and I don't know. At a certain point, like you can just say, like, you could have just seen the 720 hertz, that FPS thing being corrected once and been like, oops, I misunderstood that, bye. But I guess, I guess that's not how these things ever go online. They're people willing to admit that they like, misquoted or misunderstood at something online or very few and far between. Now you would expect maybe more of that with an account that has 10,000 followers and actually gets like some press coverage, but I guess, I guess not.

Speaker 1:
[45:04] Well, and that's what I want to say too, is like there's now I'm sure already dozens of comments saying, why do you waste time on drama? Guys, I wasn't, I would only talk about this because the press is covering his nonsense and confusing people and my job is to cover gaming hardware in the future of it. And I have to cover this so that the press knows to stop doing this so that you, the viewers who are confused by seeing these headlines know that it's nonsense. And I had to cover it to this degree because you got to see just how nonsensical it is that someone's saying I said something where I explicitly said the opposite. It's unprofessional, clownish and childish and it's confusing people and it's wrong. So that's why we have to talk about it. If there were no articles written about it, we wouldn't have talked about it. I don't care.

Speaker 2:
[45:49] Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I guess also just in general, trolling, not trolling Twitter, prowling Twitter for content. Maybe not always the best use of time. I don't know, I guess, to give some credit to tech journalists, Kepler is at least an account with somewhat of a reputation that goes back a while, but like...

Speaker 1:
[46:20] Yeah, the 2 to 4X times the performance of RDNA2 reputation, of nonsense.

Speaker 2:
[46:24] Every once in a while, though, you'll see some of these outlets cover like, oh, this Twitter account that has no history of saying anything ever. Let's just write an article about whatever this is.

Speaker 1:
[46:39] Wow. Yeah, I mean, I... That is where the great riff happened with Hisana WCCF Tech and Video Cards when I showed that they were quoting an account that was like a month old that was... QXE is, I guess, the guy's real name that I had proof that he was clowning on them by putting no... The Y and X axis weren't labeled. He just had random charts that said this is performance.

Speaker 2:
[47:02] That was a good one.

Speaker 1:
[47:03] They were writing articles. I'm like, all right, this is where I draw the line. The X and the Y axis aren't even labeled. We don't even know who this account is. Or I do. It's someone who's messing with journalists intentionally.

Speaker 2:
[47:11] It does remind me that I remember one time I saw like a movie review quote on like, I think a Transformers poster. And I was like, they quoted some Twitter account and I was like, what is this Twitter account? And it was just a random guy on Twitter. And I was like, oh, that's what it reminds me of.

Speaker 1:
[47:32] Same as Roger Ebert.

Speaker 2:
[47:33] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[47:35] But yeah, so I don't know. I don't want to dwell on this part anymore. I want to get back to the core thing, which is this doomer maxing, as I called it here, or doomerism, I believe, will probably be what's the title of this episode. What do you? Well, yeah, we gotta use some of the brainwads. Speak to doomer maxing, happy mogging, I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[47:54] Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I agree, it doesn't matter what it is.

Speaker 1:
[48:16] There's all of this negative, maybe that's just the internet in 2026, but there, and because of all the shortages right now, causing things to be more expensive. But it seems like everything just turns into article after article of actually, this is why everything's gonna suck. Right? This is to stop.

Speaker 2:
[48:37] I think it comes from one, there is to some extent pessimism. I was combining words there. I think pessimism is by some people viewed as more thoughtful a lot of the time, and then also we're just going through a not great period, and I would say in the news in general, and in the PC gaming hardware space in general too, because of these RAM shortages, and when you're on that, I think if you generate, you'll end up generating more clicks. If you start speculating, well, it's bad right now. What are the implications of this for next-gen consoles or whatever? I think that could be where some of it comes from. Okay, so RAM prices are super expensive. Well, that means that either the PS6 and Helix have to be astronomically expensive, or they have to delay it to avoid the pitfalls of the RAM shortage. When in reality, the PS6 and Helix are both probably what? A year and a half out.

Speaker 1:
[49:51] Closer to two years than one year.

Speaker 2:
[49:54] This shortage will probably continue for, I don't know, six months to a year. Like maybe, there will probably be long-winding effects of it that maybe go out to that. Maybe the consoles will be a bit more expensive than they would have been otherwise. But like, I don't think, one, they can just push back these consoles indefinitely because eventually you miss your window for when something can release like what we're seeing right now with the Steambox, I think. And two, like these consoles in a lot of ways aren't, are somewhat lost leaders and they need to like consider the, like, okay, maybe we won't make as high of a margin on this console immediately, but we'll make that money up on the back end, either through like this console will, it's be outright profitable within two years. And the people that buy in early are probably going to have a pretty high attach rate. So, okay, let's say they sell this for a, I don't know, $80 loss or something, okay, after an early buyer buys two or three games, depending on like if those are exclusives or third parties, I mean, they've probably already broken even on that early buyer. And then you look at like the Game Pass subscription that they're probably getting with Xbox and the PlayStation Plus, depending on what tier you buy, that person's spending like $60 to $120 a year, if I'm remembering the prices for PlayStation Plus. So yeah, like they'll make money off of it long-term. And I don't think we're at a point yet where you would expect consoles to just be reaching $1,000 or something, unless like...

Speaker 1:
[51:42] Again, maybe Helix, but...

Speaker 2:
[51:44] Yeah, but I think the Helix is like this weird thing where it's a kind of not a console console at this point. Like I think XBOX and Microsoft should give up on the idea of having a direct and obvious competitor to the PlayStation, because I think after what, four generations of this, that's pretty obvious.

Speaker 1:
[52:04] Yeah, you could almost argue like a $1,000 price point would just be to say it's not a PS6. Yeah, it is not a PS6. It's a PC just to like say like a statement that this isn't what it is.

Speaker 2:
[52:16] Yeah, like I think very clearly what they're showing is that the Helix is a new entry point into PC gaming rather than its own console outright. So it's, I mean, it's like a hybrid or a bridge between whatever comes next for XBOX, assuming XBOX continues to be a brand into the future.

Speaker 1:
[52:38] But yeah, and I don't know how much more there is to dwell on like all of this. Like, it's just, I just continue to believe people don't understand, like how expensive it is to design an SOC and that like tens, maybe a hundred million dollars and that RAM is just one of the components. And if they have to spend an extra hundred dollars on the box or 200, although again, guys, they negotiate prices that are way below the spot price, especially during shortages. It's even more pronounced. Like when there's abundant RAM, Sony's deal is probably like, I don't know, half the cost, 30% less for some components compared to what you're going to get on Newegg. During a shortage, because they're negotiating and they have the power to directly reach out to these companies, it might be a third the price of what you're paying. Like it's actually more in their favor.

Speaker 2:
[53:28] So Sony's not buying kits off of Newegg for the PS5? I mean PS6?

Speaker 1:
[53:32] They are not, but a lot of people seem to think they are. And also, you have to understand these long term RAM deals are long term. Sony doesn't just go, hey, we're going to buy, this is our big deal with Samsung to buy RAM for a month. No, they have a contract for one, two, three years. And so if they do that, Samsung might give them a price that's in between where they think prices could be in three years versus where it would be now because they are like, well, we're giving Sony the RAM for a third the price of what everyone else is paying or half the price. They bought three years worth of RAM and we're locking them in to pay an extra for three years. That's why they will not pay the RAM prices even close to what you see because they buy so much ahead of time. I mean, go on.

Speaker 2:
[54:18] I mean, I think Sony probably speculates that this thing will sell. I don't know where this number comes from, but about 100 million. If we look historically at how much PlayStation consoles tend to sell, like with the exception of the PS2, it's usually pretty close to 100 million.

Speaker 1:
[54:36] So they'll want to buy enough RAM for at least 20 million out of the gate, maybe 30, 40, you know? And so, yeah, I don't know. So again, we're not, I can't promise you it's not going to be 900 maybe. And I wouldn't be surprised, like I'm looking at my bomb sheet here again, if PS6, the standard one was like 600 bucks, 700 bucks. It wouldn't surprise me, but I do not think $1,000 or more. And no, it won't launch in 2029. And yes, they will try to have some exclusives that make you want to buy it. Like the Doomer Maxine is out of hand, but Wood writes him, I'm curious if you have any indications on PS5 Pro support expanding with the release of PS6, or is it not as much of a pain free addition if they are doing some things for PS6 support? I don't think it even has to do with PS6. I've already leaked they are expanding and making it easier to support PS5 Pro enhancements directly. They've patched it all the way back to like the original PS5 Pro era SDK. Any game released 2024 or later, basically now, can almost flip a switch and get more PS5 Pro enhancements. So I think you're going to see more and more of that. And look, once PS6 comes out, yeah, I think most games will have that enhancement for sure, right? But I don't know that it's just because of PS6. It's just it's been out longer. Deuce Nitta writes in, Is there any potential cost saving for PS6 or Canis by using a slower NVMe?

Speaker 2:
[55:59] No.

Speaker 1:
[56:02] When you buy these things in bulk, what Sony is going to do is they're going to triangulate what they think they need for bandwidth from the SSD and then they're going to min-max that with where they think they can get the best price and volume long-term. It's not just about the price for the SSD, it's volume. It's like, let's say, there's a six, like an eight gigabyte per second SSD they might want as the standard. And then there's like a 7.8 one. They're not doing that just because they're a lot, if they went down that little bit, it might just be because they know there's another SSD manufacturer that more easily gets to that speed so they can source easier. So that's the type of stuff they're going to weigh. But no, they're not going to go slower than now to save money because it really doesn't save any money. By the time, and remember, these will be sold from 2027 till like 2035 or 25. These things are going to be sold for a long time. The RAM, the speeds that look insane now will not look insane by then. So they're going to plan ahead. What's the speed where we get the benefit we need, but it's just slow enough that it will probably only be expensive for like a month until prices continue to fall. That's what they're going to triangulate. The difference between a four gigabyte per second and an eight gigabyte per second in bulk will trend towards a very similar price actually for Sony.

Speaker 2:
[57:20] Well, yeah, and if you just look at the PS5s, the speed of the PS5 SSD when it came out, like it was the fastest SSD on the market basically, and now it's not like it's a pretty standard. It's not weak, but it's like a pretty standard SSD if you're like going on to Newegg buying like a new Gen 5 one, like it would be slow for that. Gen 4, I think it matches, right?

Speaker 1:
[57:46] I'd still say it's above average because I think a lot of people use slower ones, but it's above average. It's not enterprise level anymore. And XBOX, funnily enough, was 2.4 gigabytes per second. At the time, that was above average. Now that's hard to buy when that's slow, unless you're like scraping the bottom. And I would encourage people, like actually, just to really nip this one in the bud here, if I go to Newegg right now and I just search NVME SSD, let's go 512 gigabyte even because this might make my point further. If I just go lowest pricing in sort here, and then I zoom in, so the slowest one is a SATA for $76. Going from SATA for $76 to a GEN3 maxed out one, so 3.5 gigabytes per second, again, faster than the XBOX by like 1, 2, 3, 40, 50 percent. Yeah, that's $4 more to go from a, what is that, a seventh the speed or it's-

Speaker 2:
[58:55] Yeah, I mean-

Speaker 1:
[58:56] Our fifth-the-speed or like, I'm sorry, guys, like, that's my point. Sony is not going to save $4 to be a fourth-the-speed. So, there's really not a lot of cost savings there. Jay Pear writes in, I might have asked this too late. I think he submitted this for a loose ends. And I don't think it was too late. I just didn't want to answer it that episode. He says, yeah, could we see two separate SKUs for Canis, one handheld only and one with the dock, plus a separate DualSense controller if they aren't detachable? Such an option might work out well to keep the base device competitive in pricing with the Switch 2, even if the full hybrid package hits closer to $600 instead. So I think two things about this. I think there's no way in hell Sony prices the PS6 handheld next to the Switch 2. Again, like Helix, it's a statement. No, it's not 450. This is better. If we price it at 450, people will say, oh, these are kind of similar. At least 499. So people go, oh, it's a better device. But in reality, if you could afford 450, you can afford $500 for this thing. I mean, so I think that's for sure what they do. It will not be priced the same second. I'm not sure how important the dock will be. Like I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe if I'm remembering right, the Switch 2 like doubles clock speed or something from handheld mode to docked mode. What I saw in documents at this point are over a year old. Maybe they changed their mind.

Speaker 2:
[60:19] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[60:20] It wouldn't surprise me, but at least I would doubt they changed their strategy, which seemed to be like a 30% difference in performance. To me, that just seems like the difference of turning on a different version of FSR5, like going with balanced mode or performance mode in handheld. You dock at 30% more performance. Oh, now we can use balanced to upscale to 4K. I don't know how much more cooling they would even need. Like I wouldn't be surprised if the dock doesn't really do a whole lot. And the only reason it's limited to a handheld mode is just for battery life.

Speaker 2:
[60:55] Well, yeah. I mean, honestly, if they were being really lazy about it, I think just them needing to have a glorified output so you can put it on to a TV screen is essential. Even if it gets almost the same performance as it gets in the handheld mode, I think that would be sufficient. And I think they would run the risk of... There's a lot of interest in various different versions of the Canis that people talk about. And I think you could run into an issue if they made too many different versions of them because what there would be this idea of a handheld only mode, a dockable mode, and what just a home console version of it that people speculate a lot about. I think you can do two of those. And I mean, I don't know. I could see maybe a handheld only mode coming out years later that's a lot more paired down than what you have, a la the Switch Lite.

Speaker 1:
[61:53] Yeah, remove the OLED screen, remove some storage features. I don't know, right?

Speaker 2:
[61:58] Yeah. I mean, I could see that. But I do think they should lead with a dockable handheld and the PS6 Orion. That's what comes out at the start. And then maybe in a year or two, you get the PS6S home console that uses Canis and or the handheld only mode. Although I don't know how much money you would actually save on that version of the PS6 anyways. So.

Speaker 1:
[62:29] Yeah. And again, I want to be very clear. I think all the dock would do is have a little, I mean, it might just be like a USB-C cable that plugs into a cheap two-prong plug. And then it has an HDMI port that plugs into an HD, the USB-C on the console, which maybe you don't even need the dock to plug it into a TV. And then it just plugs into the TV. And that's just to have like an eloquent or sleek way of putting it down to plug into the TV. I don't think the dock's gonna cost them a lot, guys. They need to include a charger anyways. You might as well add $5 of plastic to like make it hold the device.

Speaker 2:
[63:07] Yeah, I mean, almost like the dock could just be like a glorified cable manager in some ways, like.

Speaker 1:
[63:14] Yeah, yeah. And that's it. They're literally like, they have to include a charger anyways. This is a way to barely add cost to make it a dock so they can market it against the Switch 2 as a premium device. But I would not surprise me if like there's a fan on this handheld that has a higher fan setting that kicks in. And that's it. It's just that it's plugged in for more stable power and the fan can be turned up because you're not holding it. So it won't be as annoying if it's loud. And the main reason really that there's different clock speeds in handheld mode is just to try to get a good battery life. And they know you're using like a seven inch 1080p screen. So who the heck cares? It's going to look great anyways. Like I genuinely think that would be the plan. This piece of content is brought to you by the MINISFORUM Elite M1 Lite 125U. This compact, if I may say so, very attractive and sleek mini PC comes with a Core Ultra 5125U that has 12 cores that boost up to 4.3 GHz with a 35 watt TDP and 21 tops. And with that 35 watt TDP, despite being compact, it is very quiet. You never really hear it while it's running. And it also just really allows you to do anything a normal desktop would allow you to do. It has support for triple displays, dual PCIe Gen 4 support, Wi-Fi 6E included, and you can have up to 96 gigabytes of DDR5. It's pretty reasonably priced as well, if I may say so, but you can actually save even more money than the list price if you use offer code BROKENCILICON to save $30. So, support Moore's Law Is Dead by clicking on the link below and checking out the MINISFORUM Elite M1 Lite 125U today. Denys117 writes in, you've talked recently about how it might make sense for Sony to do a PS6 home console based on the Canis chip to produce a Series S style cheaper option, but avoiding the pitfalls that made the Series S suck. Would there be any problem with RAM capacity though? The handheld is expected to get away with less RAM by probably only targeting 1080p, but once you are hooking it up to televisions, aren't you now wanting to probably reach for higher resolutions? I would generally expect the Canis home console to have a higher wattage than the handheld to account for pushing up higher upscaling targets. Wrong. No, I would not do that. It has to be a fixed function piece of hardware. But couldn't this lead to RAM issues versus the handheld? No, you wouldn't change RAM or anything. Guys, 1080p is what a lot of people are still fine with. I think you're missing the point here. The entire point of the handheld, and there being a difference between a docked one and not is what I said previously. It boosts a little bit more because now it doesn't need to worry about saving battery life. And all that does is allow them to go from FSR5 performance mode and handheld to balanced and upscale to 4K instead of upscale to 1080p. That's it. I think it'll look fine. And there's plenty of people that don't have 4K displays. They have 1440p or 1080p displays. And there's plenty of people that are fine with Sony upscaling their game from maybe 720p to 4K with PSSR3 or FSR5. It'll look pretty dang good. And they're sitting away from the TV anyway, so they don't need it to be ultra sharp. And they'll be fine with that. And that's it. And that's, no, they won't give more RAM or higher clocks to the console version, if there is. I want to say that too. That's complete speculation on my part that there's a PS success. I'm not saying I'm sure there will be. But if they do, it'll be literally the same thing, just cheaper.

Speaker 2:
[66:49] Yeah, and what I was going to say, I mean, to me, the idea that this would primarily run in 1080p, maybe 1440p or something, I don't know, or upscaled to 1440p, although...

Speaker 1:
[67:01] Well, it'll be upscaled to 4K anyways, right?

Speaker 2:
[67:03] Yeah, true.

Speaker 1:
[67:04] And we've already, I've used Ultra Performance Mode with DLSS4, I mean, like Ultra Performance Mode, DLSS4 Base Resolution. And I wouldn't say it looks as good as native, and I can certainly tell the difference between balanced mode, but yeah, that upscales from 720p to 4K already. Yeah. I think that looks fine, and many people would accept that.

Speaker 2:
[67:29] Yeah, but just what I was gonna say, like the idea to me is that a PS6S, I guess we're calling it, would be meant to target people that are holdouts that are still fine with gaming in 1080p, which is frankly a lot of people, like just as an example, I mean, I'm looking at the Steam Hardware Survey from this year, 49% of monitors are still, or 51% of monitors are still 1080p on the Steam Hardware Survey. A lot of people still game in 1080p. I know that's a monitor versus a TV, and I'm sure new sales for TVs are probably 4K a lot more often now than they used to be, but a lot of people-

Speaker 1:
[68:16] Crazy cheap, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[68:17] But a lot of people don't care, and I'm guessing the people that you're trying to pull in with a PS6S are a lot of PS4 holdouts or people that like bought a PS4 in like 10 years ago now. And this is, this is there, them trying to get them to actually buy into a next-gen console finally. And those people are probably either still gaming on a 1080p monitor or TV, or they have a 4K display that they bought for like 300 bucks because sure, I'll get the 4K display for 300 bucks, but they don't really care that it's the, they're still playing in 1080p.

Speaker 1:
[68:58] You know, it's funny as well, this discussion we just had where I said, or you said that the dock for the PS6 handheld may be a glorified wire router, you know, like wire manager. Yeah, like it's just a plastic, like little stand that has cost them dollars in the single digits and has a USB input to just put the output from the console to your TV and it plugs into the wall to charge it. That's it, it like cost them almost nothing to make this thing. That makes me wonder if they even need a PS6S though. I mean, because my bomb cost analysis is sure, the handheld will be more expensive than a cheap box would be. But if they got it to 499, maybe that's enough. I mean, and maybe Sony could subsidize this one more than the Orion console, because what they would say is, well, this is portable. People are going to take this and go outside, and that's free marketing to buy a PS6. And so we're just going to make the dock cheap enough that this is 499, and therefore cheaper than the base PS5 anyways is right now. And people will lose their minds over a 499 handheld that can play all their PS5 games, and then they're going to go out and tell their friends and show them it. And there's an argument maybe they don't want a PS6S. Remember, that's speculation by it. Maybe they make the handheld cheap enough that they don't need the S.

Speaker 2:
[70:24] Yeah, okay. I was just looking this up because... So the Vita TV or PlayStation TV came out two years after the PlayStation Vita. So like, I think PS6S would very much be something that comes out like PlayStation TV-esque. Yeah. So I think if they could somehow get the cost down to like from $500 to $300 bucks and it comes out like two or three years later, I think there's a case to be made for it. I agree, like, I don't think the home console only version of a PS6 using Canis. I don't think that's something that's like they're forward with their marketing. Like that's something that comes out as like a budget thing much later. Because, yeah, especially if, especially like if the handheld just has a dock and the dock doesn't, especially if it doesn't really do that much. Like, yeah, there's really not that much of a reason because what you're saving the money, I guess the packaging or the overall package is a bit cheaper.

Speaker 1:
[71:31] Like, you don't have a battery and a screen.

Speaker 2:
[71:33] You don't have a battery, a screen. The box is probably a little bit smaller. Maybe this cooling is a little simpler. I don't know. But so it will be overall cheaper, smaller, but simpler.

Speaker 1:
[71:44] You don't need a fancy thin fan. You can just get the cheapest $2 fan and throw it on top of a piece of aluminum. Yeah, so I don't know. I'm going to start noodling on that more, because the more I think about it, I think people don't understand this. The number one reason, so let me back up. The Switch Lite, a lot of people say exists because they die-shrunk the Switch from whatever it was, right? I don't remember if it started on 20 nanometer and then went to 16 or what. And they say, well, that's why they could then make the Switch Lite. And it's like, no, I actually, it's my understanding that the Switch Lite exists because they just took the yields of the Switch One that couldn't boost as high. And so it didn't work in docked mode. And they just made it a handheld only model. I believe that's actually why they did that. Now, it helped that they got a die-shrink out of it to make it work better. But I am just saying, I do believe that's one of the main reasons that exists. One of the main reasons a PS6S would exist is, or I've already leaked in my handheld leak that they don't seem to be planning to disable any compute units or cores on this, because the die is small enough on such a mature and advanced node that they don't think a lot of them will have defects. Well, that still doesn't mean that you might have some that require more voltage to run. So my suspicion for a PS6S would be that if it comes out, what it will be is for the first two years of the console's life, they save up the yields that maybe run at 30 watts instead of 15 watts. So they're not good enough for a handheld, but they still work. And they just save those up and save those up and save those up, wait for costs to go down further, for the shortages to further dissipate from where the console wants. And that's where they get a 299 box that they drop and just say, shut up, you can play GTA 6 guys, come on. So yeah, I think I agree. I think it's interesting. This is a pretty productive conversation. The more I talk about this, the more I'm like, I think they can just make that handheld cheap enough that they don't need the S right away. And the S would launch later so that you use up those yields, but you had to build them up over time because there won't be a lot of yields that need that much voltage. You're saving them up for years till you need to use them for something. So yeah, I mean, that's what I probably think the PS6S will be. By the way, I want to be clear, like I keep talking about the PS6S as an example. I never really thought that'd be there at launch. Unless the economy was so bad, they thought they had to do that.

Speaker 2:
[74:07] Yeah, and the PS6S of the things we talk about with next-gen consoles, the PS6S feels much, is very clearly, I think, the most speculative of everything we talk about.

Speaker 1:
[74:22] I have no one document saying there's gonna be a PS6S. I want to be clear about that. If they really wanted to, they could do something super cheap. And I mostly use it to demonstrate how new tech is actually cheaper than old tech. It's a better PS5 for less money is what it would be if we did it.

Speaker 2:
[74:38] Yeah, and I would be shocked if these conversations about, well, could we put this in a con, just a small home console thing? I'd be shocked if those conversations aren't happening at Sony, but.

Speaker 1:
[74:49] Yeah. But yeah, so I just wanted to clear that up as well. Okay, so Fooz Your Do's writes in and says, is Sony going to keep up with the proprietary Tempest 3D audio or will they finally cough up the licensing fee to Dolby so we can get proper Atmos support next gen? I'm asking for my audio system. Carbon Cry answered this question. Tempest 3D is not entirely proprietary and it isn't the same thing as Dolby Atmos. Atmos is a format with 3D already embedded in the audio file. Tempest is a dynamic system to compose 3D audio on the fly. Oh, so would that probably mean it's not compatible, right? So that's why, is because it just does it in a different, frankly more advanced or intensive way. And that's why it wouldn't be compatible. But thank you for writing in. All right, we've been dwelling on story number two for the length of an entire die shrink, Dan. So now let us finally move on to story number three. AMD Steamboat brings 288 cores to Epic and 72 cores to AM5. All right, time to discuss the big Moore's Law Is Dead exclusive of the past week. And that was a Zen 7 leak. We already have leaked pretty much everything you need to know about Zen 6. And so moving forward, we've been diving more and more and more into Zen 7. This time, this leak, our information comes mainly from the Epic side. And it is thus about Zen 7 Florence. I believe I was the first to confirm. I don't think I've even talked to you about that, right Dan? Zen 7 Epic, it's called Florence. I know the code name's circulated and people weren't sure. That is what the Zen 7 Steamboat, well and other versions of it, right? Epic products will be code named. First, let's start with the IO dies. Florence changes the setup by splitting memory from the IO die itself into a Dorca IO chiplet and Mathura memory die. Two of them each, both on N3C, that's the budget version of TSMC 3nm. We aren't quite sure why or how or what it will look like. I don't have a diagram, but every document says two IO dies, two memory dies. That's interesting. However, this is also interesting. I have documents that say Zen 7 will be backwards compatible with the Zen 6 IO dies as well. Specifically, it just mentions all different types of Zen 6 IO dies. And so this could play a big role in Threadripper and desktop. Maybe they will use the Threadripper Zen 6 IO die with Zen 7 chiplets to save money on Workstation versus Epic. And then also this kind of suggests that Zen 6's IO die might actually be N3C, by the way, not 6 nanometer. We'll see. Next, we have to come to where our Zen 7 leaks really started. Steamboat. I believe that was a leak I put out while we were in Scotland last year, Dan. This is the fully 3D chip where all L3 cache is on a different die than the cores. We now know at first the diagram showed 33 cores. New ones say 36 cores. This is an upgrade then from 264 cores in the initial leak to now seemingly AMD is planning for 288 cores on EPYC. The way that this works is there is an N4C cache die on the bottom, and then on top of that, they put the 36 core TSMC A14 cores. Here's where things get more interesting though. Because the L3 is not on the cores, because they're split up and stacked, the footprint on a PCB or SOC, it's actually smaller. Now, I didn't know how much smaller. I didn't know the die size before, but now I know the die size of the cache die, which is what would be you'd worry about, is 114 millimeters squared, and the width is the same as the width of the CCDs for Silver King, which is the short king, small budget die, and then Silver Ton, which is, I think that's how I now remember which one's the small one, even though it's called King, because Silver King's a short king. And then Silver Ton is the 16-core, directly references the high-frequency, high-performance die. So think about what that means if they're the same width. If you think about what the IO die is, everybody, you should be able to fit any of these. Silver King, and then it just gets longer for Silver Ton, for 16-cores, and then slightly longer for the 114 16-millimeter squared cache die that has 36-cores on top of it. If so facto, it seems like they could fit 72-cores on AM5 if they wanted to, and all documents that I have showed that the Steamboat CCD is interface and width and size compatible with the same interfaces that you would plug the 16 and the 8-core into. So also just theoretically, it should just plug right in. So will they do this? I don't know. I honestly think probably not, but I do think that's interesting to think that they could possibly bring 72 cores to AM5 to compete with like Razor Lake or Hammer Lake in a few years. And by the way, to the people worried about bandwidth, it actually has more cash than standard Zen 7 per die. It's not like 3D, X3D where it will have like, I think it's going to be 16, maybe, or is it 10? It's a lot, a lot of cash per core. But what you need to know is I believe it's like 10 megabytes per core for X3D with Zen 7, only, only four with the standard, which is the same amount they have right now at 7.5. And then there's seven megabytes per core with Steamboat cores. So not only do they take up less space per core, but they actually have more cash than the gaming die, suggesting that actually that might help make up for bandwidth constraints. And while some apps would be bottlenecked, I actually think it would work. And so AMD has this monster, if they want to, to compete with whatever Infinite Core dies, Nova Lake and Razor Lake have. But yeah, so what do you think about this, Dan?

Speaker 2:
[80:30] And yeah, at a minimum, like clearly these, or at least they seem to be being built to have a large amount of modularity, I guess you would say between the IO dies and the core chiplets, whatever we were calling them at this point. And yeah, I think the most fun thing to think about is, could they bring that to desktop? I would say like, I don't know, 72 core on AM5, only seems like a good idea, or that useful of an idea maybe, if they actually come out with a chipset that really has a lot of IO for like this, because I think this is where they're getting fully into, well, we just have HEDT on AM5 at this point. And if they can't do that and bring at least a quasi HEDT amount of IO to it, I don't know why they would release this, but because like I think this is like productivity on a budget type thing, possibly. I mean, I could see this still costing like $2,000 or something.

Speaker 1:
[81:45] Oh, I think this would cost like three grand. Like that's the thing too, is it would be really expensive and not arbitrarily this time. It's not like, I mean, somewhat arbitrarily, I guess, because, you know what, they're still selling six, 500 millimeters squared of silicon with like, when they were selling RDNA 3 for just a grand. But just keep in mind, everybody, this would have two CCDs that are double stacked. So you're having like 100, 234 or something millimeters squared of four nanometer, plus over 200 millimeters squared of A14, plus possibly 155 of N3C. That's, I mean, we're talking, you know, 50, 90 prices for the silicon in total. So this would be a very expensive product.

Speaker 2:
[82:31] Yeah, but I do think there is like, as prosumer, I think becomes a larger and larger category of consumer, I guess. It would kind of make sense to have something like this exist on the market. I mean, maybe like lower end thread ripper motherboards and CPUs are good enough to occupy that space. But like with the amount of like influencers, there are amount of people that do like side gigs at this point. Like I could see like a true base level, like prosumer type thing where there's this expensive CPU with maybe a slightly cheaper motherboard that's not like a completely professional grade motherboard that has like, I don't know what, like, what would it be like 30 or 40 or something PCIe lanes for it? Like would make a lot of sense.

Speaker 1:
[83:27] I think you'd want to double what they have now, you know? So you'd be looking at something that's like half a fourth as many lanes as thread ripper. But twice as much as the standard chipset, you know, the motherboards will probably be $500 or at least 400, but at least you don't have to go $1,000 motherboard. I do think there's firmly room for this now, but they would need that. And by the way, the thing I point out in the video is that this would only exist in my opinion if they think they need it to compete with Intel and not lose performance crowns to Intel. Because everything in the sales data is screaming, they just make 8 cores. That's why they're making Silver King. Because they know into the future that they should just keep making some 8 cores because that's what most people want. And it's interesting though, Dan, I even went and looked at it because Newegg lets you search for the best selling server CPUs. They're 16 cores. So if people buy HEDT for IO and this really only makes sense if they have that chipset as well. So hopefully they do what me and you have been talking about them hopefully doing that since, I mean, AM4. I mean, hopefully there is some high end chipset for AM5 eventually that feels pseudo HEDT or is HEDT. But I would say this would require that to have it. One last thing, don't forget that they could do 16 plus 36. Like, so they could make this where there's 16, like seven gigahertz cores with cash on them. And then you have another 36 cores or something. That's to, I guess, win the Cinebench-a-thon with Razer Lake or whatever, still keeping the gaming crown firmly. So there's a lot of options here, but I just, this is like something I pointed out when Alder Lake launched, and AMD didn't even bother to launch a 5950X3D2. I'm like, guys, that's actually not them weak. That's them saying they don't need it to outsell Intel. And they were right. Like, they never released a Zen 3 Plus, which was a thing that was briefly considered behind the scenes. It was never close to being made, but it was, they considered it. They never released the full X3D Zen 3 lineup to compete with Alder Lake. They just kind of like said, cute, who cares? And whatever we see happen, it's all gonna come down to if Intel makes them nervous. But if they want to, they can launch a 16 core with like 400 or whatever, 224 megabytes of cash on it, 7 gigahertz chiplet product that then also has a 36 core next to it, just monster. If they want to, this is where AMD could go on AM5 in three years from now, from 16 to over 50 cores. It's just hopefully Intel is competitive with Nova Lake. That's what it all comes down to. Nothing writes in with something and says, in Broken Silicon 355, you said you weren't sure if Zen 6 Desktop would come out in less than a year. Do you think we can count on Zen 6 Desktop launching even in the first half of next year then, or even is that up for grabs? I think it's up for debate, actually. Zen 6 Venice will come to server this year. Part of this leak, I actually put out another roadmap, which just shows like, Zen 6 comes to Epic this year, Zen 7 comes to Epic exactly two years later, so they're not going to miss that cadence, baby. So, which is going to be interesting to see like, maybe Zen 6 launch and then just a year later, Zen 7 comes out on Epic. But so that's happening on time and I believe at CES in the beginning of next year, they will for sure show off the Medusa family and launch those before this, the middle of next year. But do you agree, it's just, does Nova Lake threaten them? I mean, they just launched a 9950X3D2 and it's going to be $900. Well, on paper, it'll probably go above that because it'll be in demand. I think they're going to wait and see later this year. I think Nova Lake's slipping to next year too. There's rumors about that. So I just think it'll probably launch the first half of next year, but only if they think Nova Lake's a true threat. And I can't rule out it comes out in the summer or end of summer next year. Unfortunately, I can't rule that out because they're just dominating sales in desktop right now. That's not a concern. And if I were them, and again, I hope they don't do this, but this is, I'm just saying this is what I would do if I was them. I would say RAM sucks right now. So why would we launch a new high-end platform that are platform, maybe platform and CPOs that require the faster RAM probably to get the most out of these 24 cores, the Zen 6. Why would we do that right now until RAM prices are cheaper? Number one, and then number two, I mean, at the end of the day, like we're just not threatened by Intel. And so we should just wait until like the Vcash is ready. And like, and we have like, we can have like a huge proper launch, right? There's just, oh, and focus on laptop. Like, why would we launch desktop now when all of our effort should be doing what Strix failed to do, which was get more laptop market share. Like they took a little here and there, but it's like they could lose it to Panther, like an oval, like that should be the focus next year, really not desktop.

Speaker 2:
[88:31] I mean, yeah. And like if they need a high-end launch, like, well, I guess they're kind of exhausted with the release of the 9950X3. 9950X3D2, that's a mouthful of a product name. But yeah, I guess that will have to tide them over, but I was also gonna say, like, I don't know, we're also seeing the revival of a bunch of old parts right now, both CPU and GPU. Like I think that's the indicator to look at where the PC market is right now, right?

Speaker 1:
[89:01] Yeah, the 3060 is gonna relaunch from Nvidia, and then also the 5800X3D, Raptor Lake, like, yeah. Which we'll get to that later. But yeah, so I don't, I think all indications are that, like, we should be focusing on laptop right now. That's where we kind of stumbled a little with last gen.

Speaker 2:
[89:23] And that's where things are the most tit for tat right now, too.

Speaker 1:
[89:26] Yeah, and when it comes to desktop, why do you guys even want Zen 6 if RAM is this expensive? Like, I think, so I think it's not even really about when it's ready anymore. It was, like, it seemed like N2X, the node desktop will use was delayed, but at TSMC, and that caused some delays, but it seems like mostly they're probably, if I were guessing, they're going to wait until kind of mid to early late, like quarter three next year, just because, like, they just want RAM to be cheap when they launch a new lineup. And like, and look at Nova Lake, like if Nova Lake launches next to $400 RAM and you need a new platform to get it, is AMD worried about that?

Speaker 2:
[90:02] I don't think they're worried about it at all. $1,200 entry fee or whatever to get to Nova Lake.

Speaker 1:
[90:06] You know what would be really funny? If all AMD did is shrugged when Alder Lake came out, they launched the 5800X3D and then shrugged, it'd be hilarious if the bane of Nova Lake was not even a new one, but the 5800X3D again.

Speaker 2:
[90:23] The 5800X3D will never die.

Speaker 1:
[90:27] Yeah, I think, yeah, to your point, what does that tell you? They're launching the 5800X3D, that might be their answer to Nova Lake. 0X000FF4 writes in, it says, how much will the highest SK of Zen 7 Threadripper cost and when will it come out? Also, what will be the socket and what RAM will it use? DDR5, that was another thing I didn't mention, but it seems like all future roadmaps still show DDR5 for a lot of stuff in Epic. It seems like AMD either doesn't need, want, think it's worth it to use DDR6 until like 2029 or something.

Speaker 2:
[91:01] Wait, when is DDR6 supposed to come out again? Or is it like, I don't remember.

Speaker 1:
[91:06] I don't remember. But it's like, it's kind of almost ready. It just seems like capacity right now, cost is more important than the fastest RAM. And you know, DDR5 is probably going to get to like DDR5 1200. So I don't know. I mean, by the time we get there, maybe that'll be enough anyways. But your question like, what will be the socket? We'll use DDR5 and look, if Zen 7 launches to desktop, probably late 28, early 29, then I think Threadripper, Zen 7 comes out late 29. I don't have a leak about that. I just, I could almost guarantee you that's probably what's going to happen. Maybe sooner if, you know, they continue to get more threatened by Intel and Workstation, which it sounds like they are from what people tell me lately. But when he says, let's see here, how much will it cost? More than Zen 5. Heard it here first, everybody. I mean, TMC Payton writes, and how do you, with upcoming CPU architectures, it seems like the number of segments is increasing due to higher core counts and price tiers in the high end, but no change in the low end. This trend has been happening with graphics cards. Does this trend concern you with CPUs? Not really, because you can go buy Zen 4 and it's dirt cheap and 90%, if not 97%? As good as Zen 5.

Speaker 2:
[92:26] Yeah, I don't know. I guess the thing I could see it being annoying, like it's been a perennial issue for years now, is like, how do you segment motherboards? Because like there could be an annoying thing where like even low end CPUs still go in like what would be previously thought of as like mid-range motherboards? Like, but I don't know. I think there is space in the market still for eight core CPUs and they're still coming out and there's space in the market for 24 core CPUs.

Speaker 1:
[93:01] But we'll see with Silver King. They're finally designed, because the problem is just the short king.

Speaker 2:
[93:05] We love our short kings.

Speaker 1:
[93:07] It just hasn't made sense to make budget of the newest product because it's always on the most expensive node. And it's not like before where if you make an eight core and that's it. Eight cores is the top chip for Zen 1 and Zen Plus. For sure, you have tons of six core yields and a decent amount of quad core yields. But even then you're cutting the die in half for a quad core. So there weren't that many of them. And so even back then they didn't launch a lot of them. I mean, once you get to a 12 core Zen 6, to get to a quad core, they use a third of the die. They're just not going to. So it almost doesn't make sense anymore to launch low end CPUs unless they're last gen because you don't have any yields for them. That's how AMD works at least. Intel is very different. They still make dual cores and quad cores, but that's because they still haven't figured out how to profitably make a CPU like AMD has a decade after Zen came out. I don't know why, but almost a decade, almost a decade. Or it is a decade, right? Because AM4 is its 10th anniversary. I guess it is a decade now. Right, because, well, no, but AM4 launched before Zen 1 because it had those like old Steam or Excavator APUs.

Speaker 2:
[94:18] Oh, right, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[94:19] See people, this is how broken I am by the end. I remember all of the useless information. I remember all the CPUs. Because that is my job. That is what you pay me for. All right, let us move on to story number four. This piece of content is brought to you by the fans that support the independent journalism of Moore's Law Is Dead on Patreon. And it does need supporting from personal attacks and tech elites that get mad when we tell you that they are lying to gamers and their own shareholders to legal attacks from mega corporations that cost the team time and money. This is expensive and often very stressful work. And it's work that doesn't depend on access journalism nor depend on NDAs or agreements that would sanitize our opinions and hold us back. No, nothing holds us back and we are independently funded and we use said funding to do things like pay professional renderers to show you products before they come out so that the sources that provided us the original pictures don't get in trouble. Or we also create bonus content like Dye Shrinks where you have videos and interviews coming out multiple times a month exclusively to reward our patrons with the extra content that we know they would like to see whether it's inside scoops or more in-depth conversation and stuff that we just know wouldn't profit if we put it out publicly, but it doesn't need to profit for our fans on Patreon because it is self-funded. And so if you want any of that bonus content or you want to support the independent journalism of Moore's Law Is Dead, or honestly, if you just want to support me, Dan, Gerard, Carbon Cry or Jesse and Maurice so that we have food on the table every day, consider supporting Moore's Law Is Dead on Patreon. And to those that already support us there, I'll see you on the Discord. The Nvidia warranty payout surged 1000% last year, quoting from TechSpot before the write-up. A warranty tracker recently reported that claims fulfilled by AMD and Nvidia increased substantially over the past few years. Astronomically, so in Team Green's case, well, the report does not fully explain the sudden increase, the number coincide conspicuously with the AI boom and the release of flagship, conspicuously, obviously, I would say, of flagship Nvidia graphics cards have become notorious for Milton and Bernie Cable's. Yeah, look, this is a depressing story, but not because of Nvidia's failing products, but because of the pitfalls of rushed sensationalist media. Seems to be a theme of this episode. Yes, Nvidia and AMD's warranty expenses have ballooned recently, but things are not so simple as the article and tech media make it seem. Let's demystify this then. This is about data center and AI GPUs, not about PC parts. AI GPUs get used very hard 24 7. So there is a significant failure rate in AI data centers right now. Most GPUs can be restarted, but some will fail. With GPUs costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, of course the expenses went up when they sold more expensive GPUs. Warranty Week is an obscure sensationalist publication as well. They rely on professionals to understand what is actually being said. When they show a chart of warranty claims, they expect the reader to understand that these are relative to revenue, not to units. Sadly, tech media seemingly did not read that part of the description and reported those numbers as if they were relative to units. Again, there is no mystery here. AI GPUs are expensive. They sold more of them and thus more of them failed. This is not because of the 12VH power connector. That is absurd. It doesn't even occur in the original report. Other journalists added it on. Good lord, people. Any thoughts, Dan?

Speaker 2:
[98:08] I mean, yeah, if you're curious if this is just a correlation with revenue, I don't know, look at Nvidia revenue over time. It seems to spike at around the same time that Nvidia revenue spiked massively because of the AI boom. Yeah, they're making a lot more money because they're selling a lot more things. More parts are failing. Shocker.

Speaker 1:
[98:31] Yeah. I mean, this was one of the stories that CarbonCry basically handled entirely on its own. And all I said to him was, I like, what was it? I sent him the article and I'm like, have you looked at this? Because my gut reaction was, I'm guessing these journalists didn't even f***ing sort for relative, like, if it was per unit or not. And CarbonCry looked, it was like, nope, they did not. It's nonsense. So we had to cover this because this was one of the main things everyone was talking about. I've said this many times, sometimes we cover things because you all talked about them. And so we have to touch on this because the news can just make the news sometimes. And that's all this was. This was not some increase in failures. Not to say there aren't some issues with the 12 VH power, there are some, but no, guys, it is not like 10% of 4090s are failing. They're not, they're not. It's not even a percent. It's not completely insignificant, and I still think that the dimensions on the connector could have just been five, 10% bigger with a little bit more leniency, and they wouldn't have any issues, but that did not cause a 1000% increase in the destruction of GPUs, guys.

Speaker 2:
[99:35] I mean, yeah, you can like the... I think there's something to say about like the 12VH power cable connector, like how the issue kind of faded a little bit in like public discussion, but it never really entirely went away, especially like some of those third party adapters really had bad failure rates. But yeah, I don't think that's why their failure rates suddenly went up, or I shouldn't say failure rates, warranties coverage went up 10 times. I mean, it's a little funny, you can see a spike on this chart from around when Fermi came out, but it's not a 10X spike like you're seeing right now. And if that's what it was, I think the 50-90, or not 50, 40-90 failure rates would be insanely covered rather than seen as this story that's kind of easy to miss or forget about versus back when people were all constantly talking about it. Like, what was that, 22 or something? Whatever year that was.

Speaker 1:
[100:45] But all right, let us now move on to story number five. Moore's Law Is Dead's Nvidia N1X leaks confirmed. Still no progress updates really though from me. According to Tech Power Up, in the latest images that appeared on Goofish, we see a laptop motherboard equipped with an Nvidia N1 SoC and 128 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory coarsely packed in a specialized PCB area. This area might be designated for the cooler, which could potentially also cool all those modules. Nvidia plans to introduce its N1 and N1X ARM CPUs around Computex 2020. Was this an outdated article we quoted from here? If so, yes, it was. Carbon Cry, this is two weeks old. But when is Computex?

Speaker 2:
[101:30] It's 10 days old.

Speaker 1:
[101:31] All right, I apologize to you, Carbon Cry. Computex is in two weeks. Okay. So we'll see. Maybe they will introduce it. I will be honest, if they're going to, I'll probably be tipped off by my sources some more over the next week. I should probably reach out to someone I know over there who has their hands on it. But I don't have much to say besides this picture is exactly like the picture that I already leaked when I did that video with our podcast with Wendell at Level 1 Techs. So that's confirmed. I just want to point out, I believe that podcast was a year ago that I had pictures of this. That's just not me saying, hey guys, this isn't new, I've already leaked this, where's my credit? This is also me going, guys, I've had pictures of this for a year and it still hasn't launched. There's clearly some real issues.

Speaker 2:
[102:14] Yeah, just based on how long this has been in the ether, I question if they should release this or not, but I guess it's on a motherboard.

Speaker 1:
[102:24] Yeah. By the way, I'm talking to a contact who has, one of the sources that got me pictures of this year ago. When this person, I talked to them recently, they're saying they have no idea when this is coming out. I'm a little concerned this is going to come out in Computex, it's like them saying the B770 was going to fucking come out in Computex and it never did. Maybe it will, I don't know. But the people testing these chips say the software is a nightmare and there just seems to be some hardware bugs when you run Windows. That's why they put it in the Spark, because it's a very controlled environment where it does a specific thing where you're not going to run into bugs. That's what they basically tell me.

Speaker 2:
[103:02] Yeah, maybe the ship should sail and they need to wait for the N2 or N2X.

Speaker 1:
[103:08] I mean, it needs to launch right now if it's going to, because if it waits, this is not competing with Medusa Halo, guys.

Speaker 2:
[103:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[103:14] Or a Nova like APUs. This is going to be junk compared to those. Blah, blah, blah. Jensen Wing writes in yet again, This is given the amount of application issues that still exists with Windows on ARM. Is there any reason anyone considering a Qualcomm laptop should not just buy a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air or Pro? I'm fairly sure the game support is similar or even better on Mac, actually, than Qualcomm. And every app on OS X will, you know, work. Even if via Rosetta emulation, at least it works, unlike with Qualcomm. No. And, you know, we have a story in the wrap up about like, if I scroll down here and just like look at it again, like these, you know, the new Snapdragon X Elite 2 is out. And this thing is like in like $2,000 laptops. No, no one should get Qualcomm. They keep trying to be premium and they missed it. They could have been like the $500 ultra long battery life budget chip. And now Apple's done that better with Neo. So no, I don't think, I'm sorry. Why are we getting Qualcomm when we can get Panther Lake or AMD? I don't understand.

Speaker 2:
[104:20] I mean, yeah, if you're going to try to make a premium laptop or command a premium price point, you need to make a premium laptop. And who the hell knows, maybe the Silicon in the Snapdragon X2E is great. And it's just can't be fully stretch its legs because of compatibility issues. But those compatibility issues still exists. So you can't charge the price of new, you can't charge the price that AMD and Intel are charging for their premium CPUs because they actually work on what they're, the operating systems they're designed for.

Speaker 1:
[104:57] Yeah, but, but, but, but, but, but, all right. Let us now move on. I was actually double checking. Like this is, this N1X thing is actually from this news cycle, right? And it's like, it is. That's how much we've been talking about, like other PlayStation and Zen 7 stuff that I forgot that this actually is less than two weeks old news, but whatever. My God, time is going so fast now. And yet everything that happens feels like it's a year ago because of how much news there is. OK, story number six, Moore's Law Is Dead, ARC effectively canceled leaks are conferred. Let's see here. So according to Power Up, Intel's upcoming Crescent Island series of GPUs based on the newly developed Xe3P graphics IP will be hitting the market this year. However, it seems this IP won't be featured in the desktop ARC series of discrete GPUs. What? According to a reliable leaker, Jake, which he does have a good track record, Intel will not release this GPU generation as dedicated ARC gaming cards instead. It will power the Crescent Island data center and workstation GPUs. I mean, yeah. So I'm not even going to go through the wrap up. I saw this. Everyone was talking about it. And you even had like people who said I was wrong about ARC being canceled covering that. It's just, I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[106:16] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[106:17] It's like, duh. It's like, here it is. So let's go down the list, everybody. I said, Alchemist would launch and it would be messy and all of Intel's partners were furious and it was not going to go well because the drivers weren't ready. Check. I said Battlemage actually would launch in some form, certainly on laptop and probably to some limited dedicated GPU release. Check. And look, the B770 didn't even come out. And then I said there's like one Celestial die still in the works outside of an APU. It seems like that might happen, but honestly, most people think it's never coming out.

Speaker 2:
[106:52] Check.

Speaker 1:
[106:52] And I said they would continue to make data center GPUs most likely and stuff for laptops. Check. ARC effectively canceled the check, check, check, check, check. Literally everything that I said has come true to the people that said I was guessing. Holy f**k, am I good at guessing then? Because I guessed exactly how multiple years would pan out. So no, this was from people at the top at Intel that were like, we're going to put on a good face and pretend we're not canceling this. But all evidence is and everything that we're planning for is that we're done. And yes, there will be Battlemage, Celestial to a degree. But I'll be honest, it seems to be going worse than even they said, because I thought there'd be some druid thing. And that just seems to be canceled out too. So I don't think we need to dwell on this, but come on.

Speaker 2:
[107:35] Yeah, I mean, I wish Intel would have changed their tune sooner, but it seems like, oh, why can't I even think? Gelsinger, they seemed a little bit asleep at the wheel.

Speaker 1:
[107:46] So, all right. We've talked about this long enough already, I think. Let's go to story number seven. The final story. Intel to relaunch new line of Raptor Lake refresh is to LGA 1700 from Club 386. Intel apparently doesn't plan to make a Core i9 CPU for its reported forthcoming Raptor Lake refresh lineup, according to regular Intel leaker, Jake. And oh, there he is again. So yeah, there are all these reports out there that they're releasing a refresh of the refresh of Raptor Lake, except this time, they won't brand any of them as i9s. And I'm sure this is because a lot of people are scrambling to get DDR4 because they can't get DDR5 for a reasonable price and they see an opening here. But I just, we'll talk about that a little bit. But I also want to say this, unprompted, I had sources in retail reach out to me this, maybe a week ago and say, by the way, Raptor Lake is still failing. And some of this retailer's friends who are also in retail or mom and pop shop said that they consider Raptor Lake to have an above 100% failure rate. Meaning, yes, the same person had to warranty it two, three times. There's, and then I reach out to another source of mine, actually in a different country. Is this, have you seen this as well? And this person said, no one buys Intel and do it yourself anymore. So we don't handle that much warranty. But I said, but I told him what this other person said and they said, oh yeah, for sure. I have some guy that had to return it five times. Like, so no, Raptor Lake is still breaking. Do not buy Raptor Lake. Guys, it's breaking over and over. And I had some retailers suggest that Intel makes it hard to return it sometimes, especially if it's been a couple of times. Don't buy Raptor Lake. It is a fundamental hardware flaw. They are still breaking, just people don't talk about it anymore.

Speaker 2:
[109:37] Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I get why they would want to do a refresh on this, given the current market, but I kind of almost just wish it would have been Alder Lake refresh, because Raptor Lake is cursed.

Speaker 1:
[109:52] Or if they wouldn't have rushed it out. I mean, in a way, it was for a time, seemingly kudos to them. They got a new generation out that could compete with Zen 4 in a year, like a year after Alder Lake was out or whatever it was, 13 months, you know, they got something out that was like 40% more multi-threading, 10% higher single threading. What an accomplishment. And the way that they did it is they pushed it also way too hard and didn't test it enough. So it probably should have launched half a year after Zen 4, which considering they will sell this until the end of time, I bet they wish they would have done that. But yeah, so it's just so funny because I remember how hyped, I was the person who exclusively leaked Raptor Lake, everybody. I was excited for it. I was like, whoa, Intel is going to up performance 40% gen over gen in a year? This is like a Zen 3 moment. They're just going like this, Intel is back. And then I saw the power consumption and then I saw the failures and it's, this has probably been one of the biggest whiplashes for me and excitement to like, this sucks is my opinion.

Speaker 2:
[110:49] Yeah. I mean, they, they pushed it past their architecture, past what it was engineered to do. Like that's, that's, I guess, how they got those huge gains. But kind of a poison pill.

Speaker 1:
[111:03] So again, PSA, do not buy these Raptor Lake chips. They are still failing constantly. And like there are stores that won't even carry them anymore. Obviously Micro Center, where they got all these contracts with Intel. But if you're a smaller mom and pop, some of them like refuse to carry it. Like that's how bad it is. Do the same. All right. Let us now move on to the wrap up. These are, of course, the stories that we thought deserved a discussion but did not deserve their own five to ten minute discussion. Yeah, so there's quite a few things here. XBOX basically admitted or leaked, like inside, or what is it? It was a memo that leaked from the head of XBOX where she says XBOX's game pass is too expensive. So that's interesting. You wonder, I think this puts a halt to any future price increases and you got to wonder if they're going to try to consolidate and make a cheaper option. I don't know how you walk that back.

Speaker 2:
[111:57] Yeah, I mean, I hope they do. I don't know what like a paired dea... Like, I don't know if this means... I doubt this means they get rid of their top tier. Maybe it does, but like, yeah, I would like to see a paired down version of game pass that actually kind of keeps the promise that game pass was supposed to be where people talked about how like it's such a great affordable option. I think it's very quickly drifting away from that. So, hopefully this fills something and I don't know, I'm a bit more optimistic based on stuff I've heard about Sharma taking over that things, they might be in good hands with her.

Speaker 1:
[112:35] Yeah, no, I totally agree. I definitely think there's something here more and more where I'm like, again, we'll see, this has happened. I liked Pat Gelsinger at first, but she seems to be maybe good for XBOX and maybe people shouldn't be writing off XBOX immediately here for next generation. Okay, and then we also have PS5 Panic buying. Again, this isn't a main story for a reason. I don't know how much I have to say about it, but it is interesting that when Sony announced their price increases, the PlayStation sales just went through the moon showing that there is demand there and that there were people that were always planning to get it for GTA 6 or something.

Speaker 2:
[113:15] Yeah, I mean, I suppose that makes sense, especially when you like time a price increase.

Speaker 1:
[113:23] Yeah, again, you almost wonder if what they did is they're like, all right, we think this is going to be rough during the summer, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to announce a price increase, but we're going to do it in the future so that this thing actually sells crazy well right now. And that way, all of these new games, but they did think of this, all these new games coming out, Resident Evil 9, Pragmata, everyone will rush out to buy this now, and then they'll buy more software now, and we'll make more money this summer. And then look, it's going to suck for a few months, but hopefully things will get better by the end of the year, and then we can do a price cut for Black Friday. And you know, so I think there's clearly, Sony's doing fine guys, even though they, like they basically had to raise prices eventually, like Microsoft did, but you still see something here where like they still know how to, they're probably not too mad quite yet. They'll be mad if in a year from now, they can't lower prices, but I'll say that. All right, so this was, I thought this was, you know, I'm not trying to dunk too hard here on ARC. Not that I would ever do that, but there were some Pragmata benchmarks here where I just, again, I'm gonna say this, the people that told their fans to buy ARC and said, this is good, this is an investment for the future. The A770 is almost half the performance, almost, actually, is half the performance of a 3060.

Speaker 2:
[114:45] Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. I was thinking of the 7600. Yes, it's slightly more than half the performance of a 3060.

Speaker 1:
[114:52] I would say it's half the performance of a 3060 because the higher resolution you go, the closer it gets, but it's getting fucking 30 frames per second or something and 1080p, so you're not gonna play it in 4K because you won't get a good enough frame rate. Like, it's just a joke. I just went, it's like I'm a priest, like, repent. Repent, people who told you ARC isn't canceled and you should buy it. Guys, please, so many issues in the world are people voting for things that hurt them. Fucking the people that told you to buy ARC were wrong and made you get a bad product. Accountability. Don't get mad at me. I just told you the news. All right. That's a little bit of my soapbox there, which you just have to deal with sometimes. Oh, yeah. This was an interesting one here. There were more Nvidia driver issues where like Minecraft basically didn't work. I know Nimesh here. I've talked to him before. I like this guy actually. Like a driver update came out and basically made Minecraft unplayable.

Speaker 2:
[115:54] Yeah. Well, that's those storied Nvidia drivers, Tom, that never have any issues ever except for right now, I guess. Never had any issues before, never again.

Speaker 1:
[116:06] Yeah, I just, again, this is a positive in the Radeon side. If you're choosing between Nvidia and Radeon, is Radeon will have less driver issues. Like at least since Blackwell and kind of since late Lovelace, really, Nvidia just doesn't have their eye on the ball when it comes to gaming. And you can get, we often are very critical of Radeon, but like at least their GPUs work. I just have to point that out, people. So a poll showed 71% of gamers don't want DLSS 5. I thought that was interesting. Again, these aren't like Luddites. These are people that like DLSS 4, 4.5. And I just, we don't need to dwell on it. It's in the wrap up for a reason, but everyone's saying DLSS 5 is inevitable and we're all screwed or we're all stupid and you'll learn. No, like every developer has walked back using it and gamers are saying they don't want it at all.

Speaker 2:
[116:59] Or not necessarily walked back, just had to say, hey, we didn't do this either. Like with Capcom's case.

Speaker 1:
[117:07] Yeah, yeah, right. Cause Capcom didn't know what they were going to show. And yeah. Yeah, cause they, what if Nvidia told Capcom, we're going to show off your game with DLSS 5. And they're like, cool. And then they saw it, they're like, that's not DLSS.

Speaker 2:
[117:22] That's AI Slot Filter.

Speaker 1:
[117:24] Yes. 5,800X30 Anniversary Edition was announced. We already touched on that briefly. Don't have much to say. Solid offering. If you're trying to scramble together with DDR4, it'll run the game as well. Oh my God. This, well, I'll skip the Snapdragon one. I'm going to skip the one that just mentioned it, that apparently there's a study showing that when you click reject cookies, it might do nothing and just give you all the cookies anyways.

Speaker 2:
[117:49] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[117:50] But I want to touch on this because we often talk about the AI bubble because the sooner it pops, the sooner our prices go back to normal. And the Allbirds thing is probably peak bubble. This is it. Now we're getting to peak.com stupidity where everyone's renaming their company to.com. Like Allbirds was going out of business because their footwear business didn't work. And now they say they're going to be an AI company. They're like sales data center. They're a shoe company with no infrastructure, no ability to do this. And their stock price went up f**king 600 percent.

Speaker 2:
[118:34] What was it in the? Oh, I think it was the last Broken Silicon we recorded. I talked about the stock market can be kind of stupid sometimes. I think this is a good example of what I meant, where they say AI, a shoe company is now an AI company. And I guess that means we should all invest in it, Tom. I'm sure this, if I'm wrong, I will eat an Allbirds shoe. That it works out.

Speaker 1:
[119:03] Oh yeah, I will eat one with you as well. If we can find one, they won't be making shoes. They're an AI company.

Speaker 2:
[119:08] They won't be making AI.

Speaker 1:
[119:10] Like I just, when people say, oh, you know, maybe AI is a bubble, but it's not like the.com one. It's like, no, this is dumber than pets.com. This is just the dumbest. Like pets.com was almost Amazon before it was ready, but it was stupid because it's like, why does everyone need instant delivery of pet food that you can get anywhere that's cheap? It didn't make any sense in that regard.

Speaker 2:
[119:39] Well, they were ahead of their time, Tom, because Chewy is doing great.

Speaker 1:
[119:46] But like even then, it's like the idea that's all they would do is just, a shoe company went out of business. So let's be very clear what that means. They're bad at doing their business.

Speaker 2:
[119:58] And now you're going to take the incompetent company and you're going to say, not only were you incompetent before, but now you will be competent to doing something you've never done before, which is AI. And it's just, this is peak bubble right here. This tells me we're close to the peak of the bubble. This is like, you know, I don't want to get into the blockchain stuff, but every Bitcoin bubble, like there's the same nonsense stories. And one of them's like, Bitcoin's halal now. There's always, without fail, there's an article about that at the top, or like something with like currency in the US when it's already legal. It's, this is peak, this is peak tech bubble, stuff like this.

Speaker 1:
[120:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[120:39] Converse iBlocks, what are your thoughts on the Snapdragon X2 Elite? Too little, too late. Jensen Wing writes in, with Xbox Game Pass increasing its price 25% on average each year, who's excited for? No, we already answered that too. I don't think they're going to increase Game Pass prices anywhere. I think Sharma.

Speaker 1:
[120:54] I don't think they can.

Speaker 2:
[120:56] Yeah. All right. Let me see here. Jensen Wing is another funny one. Are you going to copy the National Gallery of Art and make shorts in the style of Gen Z brain rot talk in order to grow your audience? Did an old lady come in and just like...

Speaker 1:
[121:11] Yeah, I watched the video.

Speaker 2:
[121:13] No, it's funny, but here's what I'll say, Jensen. No, but yeah, we will randomly say mogging to make people laugh.

Speaker 1:
[121:22] Yes, or maxing.

Speaker 2:
[121:26] And final question, flying through these. Mr. Tiger writes in episode 356, the risks and benefits of a more personalized gaming experience or AI, like in Red Dead Redemption 2. You made some interesting points about that, but that would reduce the shared experience of the game. Part of the fun is the forums and replicating what other people experience. How do you balance that? Well, Nvidia put their thumbs on the scale with devs to justify the silicon they dedicated to AI. Well, that's a separate question. I'm going to answer the first one. So they would still have plenty of things that are exactly the same or near exactly the same for everyone, right?

Speaker 1:
[122:00] Yeah, I don't want to see or I mean, I'm sure some game will do this experimentally and maybe it'll be cool, but like, like all a no man's sky like procedurally generated, except like this is now an AI generated game. I don't want that. I would like to see like more potentially catered experiences or interactions that like make potentially like the world feel a bit more lived in slash attuned to you rather than what we see in a lot of games where especially like once you get really proficient at playing a game, you can kind of like see the rails that it's on, you know, even games that like pride themselves in how open they are.

Speaker 2:
[122:43] You know, and actually, and you know, Dan, I would never do this to make a devil's advocate argument to here.

Speaker 1:
[122:51] Like Al Pacino.

Speaker 2:
[122:53] Yeah. In a direction you probably wouldn't expect me. Like you probably saw me to respond, Mr. Tiger, by saying something that's like, oh, well, it actually would be cool for this reason. I mean, my initial reaction just thinking here was, yeah, but how many people will share their unique experience? And then other people will try to replicate that unique experience. And there will be more things to share because they're different. Right. Like how many things are shared online because something crazy happens that no one's seen before. I think that might actually make people share it more. Another way around, like the idea I came up with for a game like Red Dead Redemption or like a GTA would be, you have like a wild card factor and maybe it's even a toggle. You can turn it up or down in the settings for fun. But you would have 99% of NPCs be normal because you want the world to have flow and order and you do want the game to generally play the same way forever. But maybe you make 1% of NPCs have their AI turned up a little bit closer to free will so that if one guy sees you rob his house five times in a month, he goes, I'm waiting in here with a shotgun and I'm so sick of this. That would be fun. And hear me out, how unreplicatable would that be? Like this is a very random poll. But I had an English teacher in high school that said what he would do as a kid in the 80s is they would get a silver or a half dollar or 50 cent dollar and they would super glue it to the floor in a mall and just sit back and watch people try to pick it up. And they would, they did it multiple times because you can guess even a free will, most people will see a half dollar. It wouldn't work with a quarter. Most people would ignore it. They did the half dollar. Most people every time without fail, someone stops and tries to pull it off the ground. Just because it's AI doesn't mean you can't like, oh, I hurt his brother or stole his car and so he didn't. No, they're probably going to be mad every time. And it just might be catered to what you did. You robbed him five times. You killed his dog when you robbed him. He's more mad. Like it still might be mostly replicatable.

Speaker 1:
[124:55] Yeah, and I wouldn't say I want to like this to spell the end of like side quests or like, I guess you would call them hidden quests where like there's not like a checkbox, but there's kind of like this, especially in Rockstar games, they really like their little hidden quest things. I wouldn't want to necessarily a death to that, but it would be interesting to see like NPCs respond more in a way that more contextually makes sense to like how you interface with the world.

Speaker 2:
[125:25] Contextual, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[125:28] Like yeah, like that or like you interact with an NPC repeatedly in a similar way. Like you say, like you rob them or some other way. It would be interesting if they would start responding to you contextually correctly. Or like hell, if you go, I don't know, into a shop all the time in Red Dead Redemption 3 or whatever, and you always buy like I don't know, one type of ammo and then you go in and buy this new type. It's like he has some response to you because he notices you're changing your buying app.

Speaker 2:
[126:07] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[126:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[126:07] He's like, huh, new gun?

Speaker 1:
[126:09] Yeah. Like that would be cool.

Speaker 2:
[126:11] That doesn't change anything. He just notices.

Speaker 1:
[126:13] I think it has the potential to make the world just feel a little bit deeper if done well.

Speaker 2:
[126:19] And like, wouldn't it be funny if they could notice like, he just came in and he usually buys a hundred rounds. He just bought a thousand rounds of ammunition. And he's like, can I notice you've done it at this time, three Thursdays in a row? What are you doing on Thursdays?

Speaker 1:
[126:33] Should I close up early today?

Speaker 2:
[126:35] Yeah. Like, and, or like, should I call the cops or like, they like, there's some context to that. You'd have to decide, does that make the game less fun if they could respond? But you can tell the AI to like, just, they always get mad if you do this. They don't get mad if you do that. You know, things like this, like it's still quite controllable. Again, the person always, a real person, tries to pick up the half dollar at the mall if you glue it to the ground, even though they all have free will. So any, as long as it was well thought out, any AI stuff could still kind of be replicatable. It's just, they don't know what's replicatable. The devs just left for more options for things to happen. And then it turns out everyone finds out, if you do this one thing, this neighbor goes berserk. And so then everyone tries to get this one guy to go berserk. You know, like that's the sort of thing that would be fun.

Speaker 1:
[127:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[127:27] All right. Well, Dan, another rather girthy episode.

Speaker 1:
[127:30] We've had many of those.

Speaker 2:
[127:33] We've been taking many girthy episodes this year, it seems.

Speaker 1:
[127:35] I'm not going to respond to that.

Speaker 2:
[127:38] And I don't know. Any final thoughts?

Speaker 1:
[127:44] I think I'm tired maxing a little bit right now.

Speaker 2:
[127:47] I'm tired maxing too. That's why I was... And I apologize. We appreciate your reader mails, but that's why I was like going through the last reader mails, just like, no, yes, no, let's go. I want to go home. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I want to eat dinner.

Speaker 1:
[127:57] Well, you are home, Tom.

Speaker 2:
[128:01] You're home, too.

Speaker 1:
[128:01] Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2:
[128:02] Oh, I want to go home. No, I'm at the office. I'll walk downstairs to go home.

Speaker 1:
[128:06] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[128:07] That tells you how tired I am as well.

Speaker 1:
[128:09] So the office in your brain is outside of the house. I guess that makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[128:13] Well, I literally do joke to my girlfriend, I'm heading to work and then I go upstairs. So yes, that is actually how my brain thinks, I think, deep down at this point. But all right, everybody, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. And please remember to share things that we asked you to share, share the content, share the video. Sharing helps a ton. Obviously comment down below. Oh boy, did we have a lot of opinions and thoughts this week. Honestly, I am curious what you, to hear more about people that maybe just didn't buy a PS6, or PS6, PS5 game, and then didn't even buy it on PC because the hype cycle had moved on. Like I'm curious, you know, if you've seen that, I'm curious.

Speaker 1:
[128:55] Or if you just forgot to buy it because you missed the hype cycle.

Speaker 2:
[128:58] Like exactly, like either way, like I'm curious what people think about that in addition to all of the other things going on. Maybe, do you think that the 5800X3D is actually the answer to NOVA? Like once again, for AMD. But otherwise, you know, also then subscribe to Moore's Law Is Dead on YouTube. Ring the bell and hype us up. Speaking of hype, use the hype points on mobile. And then also subscribe to Broken Silicon on your podcast app of choice. Like I said, a new die shrink just dropped. It is going to go into even the $1 tier by the time this comes out. Join us there. You can ask guest questions. I'm talking to Wendell at Level One Text right now, Mystic Ryan. $1 tier gets you access to asking them questions. And then the $2 tier, you get the Discord and hundreds of die shrinks and a bunch of other content as well. We'd love to talk with you there on the Discord, but I'm tired, I'm rambling. Everybody, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening and have a good week.

Speaker 1:
[129:51] Goodbye.

Speaker 2:
[129:52] This podcast was brought to you by the YouTube channel and website Moore's Law Is Dead. Moore's Law Is Dead and Broken Silicon are trademarks of their creator, Tom. That guy is me, and I am indeed the creator, editor, writer, and showrunner of Moore's Law Is Dead podcast, videos, articles, and other media. However, it's not just me. Moore's Law Is Dead is a team with Broken Silicon co-hosted by my brother Dan, audio editing by Gérard Cortez, renders being done by the industrial designer Jean-Philippe Clermont, and special assistance is also provided by Carbon Cry and Kerry Nosugata as well. Find all of our information at www.mooreslawisdead.com on the about-slash-support page in the event you do want to hire me for consulting work, hire Gérard for audio work, hire Jean-Philippe for industrial design work, or you're interested in working with Carbon Cry or Kerry Nosugata as well. You can also find our long-term sponsors on that page if you want to show them some love for putting food on our tables. Or you can also mail us some love. You can send letters or hardware donations to the following address, Moore's Law Is Dead, PO. Box 60632, and Nashville, Tennessee, zip code 37206. Although to be honest, the best way to show Moore's Law Is Dead some love is to support us on Patreon. Patrons are what makes Moore's Law Is Dead content truly possible. Every month and really every day, depending on who you're talking about, me, Gérard, Dan and Jean-Philippe are working tirelessly to provide a steady stream of content that we could not keep doing unless we knew the work was possible without being reliant on sponsors dictating every little thing we put out. Don't get us wrong, we love our sponsors, but we love directly working for you, our fans, much more. If you have any extra money, even a couple free dollars a month, consider supporting us directly on Patreon. Those couple of monthly dollars will get you access to the exclusive podcast Die Shrink, voting on subjects of future podcast episodes, the ability to ask guest questions, and of course, access to the Moore's Law Is Dead Discord full of like-minded people who I am sure would love to meet you. I am one of them. Additionally, higher tiers get access to early ad-free episodes of Broken Silicon, the ability to ask questions in all Broken Silicon episodes and loose ends live streams ahead of the recording, and the entire back catalog of Moore's Law Is Dead podcasts. In addition to having thanks in the credits of videos and podcasts, depending on the tier, with other perks available as well. And hey, if you cannot afford to support us directly every month, please do share Moore's Law Is Dead videos and podcasts with friends and family, and on social media and websites like Reddit, and give Broken Silicon a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast app of choice. All of this does really help us so much. But like I said, this podcast would not be possible without the patrons directly providing predictable and reliable support every month. And so now, it is time to give a personal thanks to the greatest of the fans. The following supporters are at the 10 GHz or higher supported levels. Brad Medlin, Drita Foles, Z Jits, Daniel Deed, Nicholas Buckner, Deke, Aaron Close, Jan Rauner, MJB1, Daniel Hi, GZ Ziggy, SNES Charmers, Jim Ferriero, Valka Malev, Jensen Wang, Zer Castro, Chris Rich, Evan Dingle, Compress AI Box, Hal Buma, Shredbird, Sammy Malas, Chris Enthinos, Jonathan, Tommy, JakeDude23, Jake Martin, Zlicky, Gamers Unite, Windwing, Ian Clifford, Mead and Pork, Tim Ra, Matthew Cassells, Travis Gooding, Suzu Taylor, Mads, Greg, Michael McGee, Stephen Coates, Amiable Chief, Mark Mitchell, Aisha, James Anderson, Mark Rademaker, Salty Internet Pirate, Henry Zhang, Wesley Sager, Cameron, Michelle Pell, Hal Cipuma, Dan M. 1988, Teek Autumn, Reginald Ari, Little Germany, Winstar, James I. Rader, Shay, Milton, Brett Jones, Chuck Glidden, Stephen Dick, Mac Daffy, Justin Bussle, Austin Haggerty, Joe Fitt, Brian Wright, Brian Scanlon, Hardlin, Slushma, Jansson Nguema, The Forbidden Jews, RB, Bing Bong 3, John Swin, Solarize80, Elbergung, Teek Geekum, Thalo215, Sputnik, Brian P, Korenster671, Penta, Winta, Omega, Doja Uyghur, Andrew Givi, Smash Axley, Mr. Tiger, John Wickham, Penguins Love AI, Porcelain Oats, Kareem El-Mazri, Rahul Chiboz, Dominic Passeri, Manos Pagrakousis, AI, Soldier789, Kevin Koontz, Jonathan Harris, Bespoke, EP, Fred, Fred Berger, Kainush Kagani, Johnny Trans, Zyber, Ahmed, Arkayo Rk0, Doodster, John Tiberius, Merica, Michael, Gerner, Andresen, and OMG Clover. And of course, thank you to Sahara for the music. If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.