14 or 15TF would probably be doable, but you'd likely give up too much in other areas if you are looking to stay in that $499 price range. Anything is possible, the price is the limiting factor. Sony could choose to take a big loss, but there are limits to what is acceptable, I think they would want a positive return down the line.
Yep and that's the thing: some people are so obsessed (ironically) on raw power and yet they still think they can get that AND everything else for $499 (some even seem to think $399). As if these companies are going to bleed hundreds on hardware ever again; those days are dead.
Yeah you can do a 14TFF/15TF system at $499 but it might not have a (good) disc drive (or one at all), you can kiss any decent amount of storage goodbye, there'll be a big cutback on I/O features for the end-user as well. And build quality might suffer on top of that.
I mean, the XSX is very likely going to be $499 and that's already at 12 and will probably sell at a loss at that MSRP, and that's with a company roughly 20x Sony's size. People forget that one of the major reasons Sony was able to eat costs on PS1 is because they actually manufactured those components directly through their own fab lines, and engineered the chips in-house. It's actually something Kutaragi poked fun at SEGA for way back in the day (because companies like SEGA and Nintendo couldn't do what Sony was able to do). Same goes for PS2.
The reason they were mostly able to absorb the losses on PS3 was due to practically every other part of the company doing very well, enough to eat the costs. Even so, it wiped out all PS1 & PS2 profits, and arguably left Sony with a phyrric victory in terms of net profit when all was said and done. Sony's doing better these days in terms of profits but not to the level they were when PS1, PS2 or even PS3 came out.
Simply put, they are
never going to (basically) price a $699 system at $399 or even $499 because there is no need to. The PS4 showed them as much, even post-PS4 Pro. Budgeting for a console includes many things beyond simply the BOM and production costs; it includes R&D dollars, distribution costs, shipping & handling costs, labor costs, marketing costs, salaries, bonuses, software R&D and development, etc.
All of that combined easily adds up to
at least $7 billion dollars (assuming a $450 BOM, 10 million unit orders for first fiscal quarter, R&D costs, production, distribution, marketing, labor, salaries, 1st party software development, OS development, bug-testing and fixes to hardware and software, etc), but it will likely be more (it will certainly be more than that for Microsoft). And that is with the assumption of a relatively well-balanced PS5 that has a respectable graphical performance (between 9-11TF), really good SSD, good memory bandwidth, robust OS and solid Year 1 1st-party games etc.
That's why I doubt there is a dual base/Pro strategy Sony is trying right out of the gate: how do they gauge the split between base and Pro? What if they over-manufacture on one and under-manufacture on the other? Wouldn't a hypothetical Pro model add on to of that $7 billion?
We gotta think about the real-world costs of this stuff because that matters to Sony and MS a lot more than a pissing contest to have the "most powerful console".
I'm simply implying that MS is maybe going for a reference navi2 design, while Sony maybe doing some customization like they did for PS4 when they increased the number of ACEs (asynchronous compute). MS could ofc make some customizations of their own as well, but I think they will stay close the the original design since they seem to embrace the PC way of doing things (more fps/res/legacy support) while Sony are making a more clean break from last-gen and pushing next-gen without legacy support. Since I suspect navi2's arcitecture is designed with PC gaming in mind, Sony could cut out parts that won't benefit their system fully with i.e. increasing other parts that do.
I don't think API implementations will make that much difference since they will be highy optimized on both systems anyways.
They could both be going for customization; people forget that the only reason XBO turned out the way it did was because Microsoft didn't even design the thing with gaming as the primary focus. And that showed in the ambition and the end product. It's why they pushed Kinect. It's why they pushed for 8GB DDR3 very, very early. It's why they had HDMI-In and talked about Halo TV series (which btw is still in limbo xD), TV TV TV etc.
But that is not the same Xbox division this time around. It should be pretty evident they are designing a gaming-first system in XSX and the fact they are already working very closely with AMD on things like ray-tracing is strong proof of such. It's not like going for gaming-specific customization is a Sony-exclusive thing; other companies past and present such as Nintendo, SEGA, SNK, NEC etc. have done this, as has Microsoft. I mean the 360 wasn't terribly long ago in terms of console gaming as a whole.
Navi2x is designed for a suite of products, from PCs to game consoles etc. The fact Sony is essentially using AMD architecture and AMD's chief focus on that architecture is not primarily with "just" console gaming, means there's a definite limit to the amount of divergence they can have. What we'll see in PS5 and XSX is the vast majority of similar feature sets, with somewhat different means (via proprietary APIs, low-level utilities etc) to utilize them, since MS holds patents on some implementations and Sony will hold patents on others.
That also means there's nothing stopping Microsoft from cutting out unnecessary features that won't fit into XSX design philosophy, same way Sony can do it for PS5. It's not like the XSX is running Windows 10, anyway; they already have Xbox OS and I'd assume they are further streamlining and optimizing it same as Sony is doing for PS5's OS, API suite etc.