I’ve seen a ton of forum posts saying that the PS4’s memory will be so expensive that it will drive the price to stratospheric levels.
The problem with refuting this is that it’s hard for consumers to find information on the price of GDDR5 chips. The closest I can come up with is the following.
If we find two graphics cards that are identical in every way aside from the amount of memory on them, then we might get some idea of how much this memory costs, at least on the retail side. Wholesale prices could be half this amount.
I did a bit of digging on Newegg and found these two cards.
EVGA GeForce 670 FTW and EVGA GeForce 670 FTW+
$420 for the 2 gig model, $460 for the 4 gig model. Companies that make these cards don’t sell them at a loss in general.
Extrapolating, the retail price for 2 gigs of GDDR5 would probably be around $40, putting the price of the entire memory of the PS4 at $160 retail. Sony is probably getting bulk discounts and wholesale prices for this memory, so I would bet it’s $100 or less for the memory in the PS4.
Add to this that it’s a single large APU chip rather than a separate large CPU and large GPU die, and the costs should be fairly reasonable.