"Moore's Law is certainly not dead! Moore's Law is continuing and we have a good path to 5nm and 3nm, and those are going to bring improved performance and good power," enthuses Goossen. "What they're not bringing any more is a good cost reduction cost per transistor - and so this has foundational impacts to console development, because now we'll get cost reductions, but they're slowing down and it won't be nearly the magnitudes that we've seen before."
The fact is that future nodes like 5nm and 3nm do deliver advantages then - and PC processors and GPUs along with smartphones can still benefit from those. But typically, consoles stick to the same performance profile across the generation. Goossen is essentially suggesting that leveraging these nodes for cheaper consoles may not be an option, which poses a difficult problem for the Xbox team going into the future with the intention of delivering even more powerful hardware. Processor performance is tied closely to transistor count - but if the cost per transistor is not reducing, a new chip with more logic will cost a lot more to make, even if it's actually smaller than today's processors. For the new consoles, a smaller, slimmer machine is a possibility - but the actual cost of making it won't change that much.
"And so that was another one of the reasons why we felt that we really had to do Series S at the beginning because we had to design for the future. For the first time, we had to have the entry-level console at the beginning. Previous generations were kind of easy because at the beginning of the generation, you make something really expensive - put as much silicon and as much performance as you could into it - then you would just ride the cost reduction curves down to mass market prices. That's not there anymore," Goossen explains.