How would you get real world data? There's not enough of facility playing every taxing game on the system from DISc to on the drive. Also hard to test real world use when these things are tested in lab setups not a entertainment center that sits on someones carpet or possibly next to a heating source like a furnace/chimney.
Easy (relatively speaking): you build testing environments taking a range of use-cases into account and build application tests to stress the platform to its limits. End user customers in the PC space can do this with CPU and GPU tests using benchmarking software to gauge performance and thermals, why can't platform holders do it?
Yes, consoles have use-cases different in a lot of ways than PCs, but if these kind of tests are possible on PC they should be able to be done with controlled experiments by platform holders to gauge how components will perform and what level of cooling they may need to hit & maintain performance targets.
Like, you can just get an entertainment center and set it up in the lab so
Thats how all revisions have worked. They for sure have internal testing data, but wont have data of someone living in humid/extreme hot locations like Florida, Arizona. And thats what you want, they will look at the hotests places mixed with what the heat curves look like which probably are recorded in firmware logs. Then sent every month for analyzing.
But these are multi-billion (multi-trillion in some cases) corporations; they have the financial and resource means to simulate that stuff with their internal testing facilities. Yes, those won't 100% reflect every individual use-case, but they'll come within 99% of them if calibrated correctly.
How do you think Sony figured the level of cooling design needed for prior systems, back when there was no internet to ping in and gather user data? And yet those systems had very adequate cooling designs for their time. That's not actually the point tho, because it's not like I'm saying the PS5 has an inadequate cooling design for either the original or revision models.
It's more just a question of if any of those prior systems had cooling designs in their original launch models that people would've considered "over-engineered" the way I am seeing some people speak about the launch PS5's cooling design (as a means of rationalizing the reduced heat pipe design of the revised model).
PS2 started giant, than after revisions of the chip and removing the HDD cage they made the slim. Also from a failure stand point stopped with ejecting trays. PS3 is the same way, after removing the PS2 chip, and sliming some things down SOC wise they were able to get the console down smaller and the back never got as hot as original PS3 did with its internal PSU.
Remember they had a regular PC power cord for original PS3 but went back to a ps2 style in the slims.
Yeah but those are revisions where multiple components were changed in the system and scaled down in size/power consumption costs. Plus as you say in your PS2 example, for those designs the chip itself also saw changes, but we are pretty sure that the SoC in the PS5 revision is the same as the one in the launch model.
For a brief moment I entertained the idea it was 6nm because there are some leaked rumors of Sony securing some 6nm fab production, but those point to models coming around the middle of 2022 at earliest, so this can't be that. This new PS5 revision only has a change in the heat pipe/sink size, the fan model and swapping out the copper plating for aluminum. AFAIK everything else remains the same.
Why are people so pathetic and whiney? He looked into the changes and showed the heatsink changed and the exhaust temps went up. And then rabid fanboys attack the guy?
Sony saw a chance to improve the design. If it is cheaper, weights less and still is stable that is better engineering. They will ship millions of pounds less each year. Good job. At the same time the newer model is a slight downgrade from the launch one. So what? It will still play games fine.
Ultimately this. But the line where the theory-crafting is coming up is to do with what has been re-engineered to lead to what can be considered better engineering versus the launch model. The fan, possibly? It's a different model after all, same supplier. Maybe there is something to the heat pipe we have not been able to see yet which is different from the older design? Maybe some particular chip components are arranged a bit differently on the PCB?
Without having concrete answers to questions like those it's actually rather difficult to say with certainty that it's better engineered except if want to blindly have faith in such because of the company designing it and the fact it's a multi-billion dollar venture. Which are very fair reasons to do so...though that hasn't prevented issues in the past from cropping up with questionably built consoles from virtually every platform holder that's ever existed, including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
IMO there's not really anything that's been displayed so far with the new design that "jumps out" to me and says "yeah that's absolutely better engineered vs. the launch model". What I see is a unit that is still perfectly fine for its task and very likely well within operational range for long-term usability, but might just be a
tad less efficient than its immediate prior model. Not a particularly big deal at the end of the day because system faulty rates won't see a surge, but it might enough a difference for some to consider picking up a launch model if given the choice.