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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Sony has an opinion of the jailbreaks that enable this, but they really don't give a shit about anyone running llama.cpp. Why would they? They're just glad you're not pirating games.

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Is there a real or imagined hardware subsidy on the PS5 hardware though? In other words, is the current MSRP below what Sony would charge in a hypothetical world where they weren’t involved in any form of gaming software business, with an assumption that they will make additional margin dollars from game sales? I can see some manager making the case that repurposing the hardware for non-gaming use is taking food off his family’s table, in a manner of speaking. If so, it’s an argument that you don’t want this type of use to become popular and have PS5s start flying off shelves and never having games bought for them.

The PS5 hardware is essentially identical to the AMD BC-250 mining rig, with the major difference being that the media engine (VCN for encoding/decoding video) is disabled in the miner because it requires Sony's proprietary bios. The BC-250 was created from binned chips that didn't meet Sony's specs and had 2 of 8 cores disabled, but many users successfully re-enabled them and bumped active CUs on the GPU from 24 to 40.

To your point, it was briefly possible to buy them for under $100 until word spread that they make decent steam machines, so I'm guessing that Sony doesn't need to sell any games to turn a profit. Even at their current prices it would be far cheaper to use the BC-250 for local inference.

> To your point, it was briefly possible to buy them for under $100 until word spread that they make decent steam machines, so I'm guessing that Sony doesn't need to sell any games to turn a profit.

I don't follow your logic. If the BC-250 was made from PS5 quality control failures, then why would their pricing have any bearing on the PS5's profitability, except as an effort to increase margins? Does cost not remain independent of pricing?

As far as I cam infer from what you said, it could be that the PS5 was sold at a loss and still is even with the BC-250 helping, or that it was sold at a profit and is still is with the BC-250 helping. What am I missing?

No it implies that å ps5 hardware wise wouldnt be ordets of magnitude of å bc250 to produce, and it therefore probably dosent have negative margins at least.

Exactly, that's what I was getting at. It's similar to Intel chip production and binning. Take Skylake for example: if a 4 core i7 chip had a core that didn't pass testing, they would disable the bad core and one more and process the chip as an i3. i5 chips were just i7 silicon with hyperthreading disabled. Same chip fab, same production cost, but the failed chips became a lower tier that sold for 35% and 70% of the top tier product. In the case of the PS5 chips, the performance difference between binned and pristine chips was even less, it still had 75% of the cores usable.

There is no hardware subsidy in the traditional sense. The last time Sony was selling consoles at a loss was the fat PS3 and they learned their lesson from all the compute clusters. Every PS5 is sold at a profit.

The only way they can lose money is if their existing users stop buying games and that's not happening yet. Maybe when vibe coded community servers for online games get better and everyone jailbreaks their console because they don't have to worry about getting banned.

But even with that every unit sold is a net positive for them because they make money off the sale, and if they run out they can use it to justify higher prices.

I don't think they care, they will just block this functionality in future updates.

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