Sony may have sold its PlayStation 3 well below the BOM, but it isn’t doing the same with PlayStation 4 as research firm IHS has claimed that PS4’s BOM + Manufacturing costs Sony $381 – $17 less than the $399 price point at which the company is selling the latest gaming console.
Based on the teardown it performed, IHS claims that the system’s processor from AMD and RAM accounts for nearly half the cost of the entire PlayStation 4 at $188. Decline in HDD costs over the last couple of years has kept the cost of PS4’s 500 GB hard drive lower by $1 as compared to PS3’s 120 GB HDD.
IHS notes that considering the $100 of the AMD’s APU, gamers are getting a monster of processing unit and it seems that Sony has tried to balance out the ‘brains’ with the economics of the console.
“This processor is a monster, with the surface area of the chip amounting to about 350 square millimeters. That is three times larger than any other chip manufactured using equivalent-process technology that has been examined by the IHS Teardown Analysis service”, notes Jordan Selburn, consumer platforms analyst at IHS.
The $381 doesn’t mean that Sony is making money right from the sale of its first console, but it means that the company has “greatly shortened path to the hardware break-even point, or even profitability, with its cost-conscious PlayStation 4 design”, said Andrew Rassweiler, senior director, cost benchmarking services for IHS in a press release.
Some of the other components and their costs are power supply ($20), optical drive ($28), controller ($18), and Mechanical / Electro-mechanical components ($35). See complete breakdown of the costs and comparison with PS3 below:
You can check out the teardown video of the PlayStation 4 on Electronics360 here.
