Xbox president Sarah Bond describing the company has working on a premium, high-end gaming console might end up being a solid indicator of it being expensive. A new report has indicated that the next-generation Xbox will have an incredibly high bill of materials cost – coming in at over $999 – which will likely mean that the console might end up costing well over the $1,000 mark.
This detail comes courtesy of known leaker KeplerL2 on the NeoGAF forums, where they also noted that the bill of materials for the AMD Magnus APU powering the next-generation Xbox alone is well over double that of the Xbox Series X/S, which comes in at $650. For the sake of context, bill of materials indicates the price of the materials that are involved in the manufacturing of any product. Companies typically pay for these materials in bulk, which tends to give them a discount over individual units, and prices for the products are usually decided after taking the bill of materials into account.
KeplerL2 also noted that the console’s price can’t be subsidised by Microsoft if the company plans to also include third-party game stores like Steam. Subsidising a console to bring its price down to even lower than its bill of materials isn’t a new thing; both Sony and Microsoft have done it quite a few times in the past. However, the companies are typically able to do this thanks to the money they then make for each game sold on the console. The presence of third-party stores like Steam or Epic Games Store on the next-gen Xbox would mean that Microsoft would miss out on the money it would typically make off games sold through its own digital store.
According to previous reports, AMD’s Magnus APU powering the next-generation Xbox will be composed of two separate chiplets – a system on a chip that handles CPU work and a Radeon-based GPU. The CPU is expected to be developed using AMD Zen 6 architecture, and is slated to have 3 cores alongside 8 Zen 6c cores. These cores will have a 12 MB L3 cache to help them process data among each other. The GPU is set to feature 68 RDNA5 compute units, 4 shader engines, and a 24 MB L2 cache.
Along with this, the console is also expected to feature a 192-bit memory bus that is capable of being configured to use 24 GB, 36 GB or 48 GB of RAM. However, the precise amount of RAM on the console hasn’t yet been confirmed. All in all, the Magnus APU will seemingly use between 250 to 350 watts of power. For the sake of comparison, the rumoured chip powering Sony’s PS6 – dubbed the Orion APU – is expected to be less powerful than the Magnus, with the latter stated as being around 30-35 percent more powerful than the former. Sony is also rumoured to be working on a handheld version of the PS6 that is capable of running on as little as 15 watts of power.
