Originally Posted by
watercooled
£700 GPU performance does not mean that would cost £700 in a console. Not to mention the current £700 Nvidia GPUs are only that price because of a lack of competition and is the wrong way to go about estimating wholesale pricing for this theoretical semi-custom Navi die. Generally, very little profit is made on console hardware, in fact they're often sold pretty much at cost or for a loss initially, so again, not comparable. Unless it's a second console released by Microsoft and they still have one available for a reasonable price to target their existing market, they'd get demolished by the competition. Outrageously expensive phones again cannot be directly compared because the cost of often amortised by way of a 24+ month contract - relatively few people will pay >£1000 up-front for a phone (and numerous reports seem to indicate that people are keeping phones for longer now).
I don't think people stopped making a fuss about the cost of phones either, the iPhone X sold terribly from what I remember, and even Apple weren't brazen enough to release that as the only option. The console market has proven time and time again that customers will switch platforms if cost/release date/performance encourage it. Don't forget the PS3 was more expensive and later than the Xbox 360. Likewise the PS4 was both cheaper and higher performance than the Xbox One, and very few people wanted Kinect forced upon them. Both times, the cheaper console sold substantially better. I very much doubt Microsoft would ignore history and try to force an outrageously expensive console onto their customers - they'd just flat-out lose to the competition again, but probably worse than ever before if it was >$1k as you suggest, something I personally very much doubt. Even with speculated hardware I don't see it being close to that figure.
Even the $499 launch price of the Xbox One had to drop in response to competition (being the generally slower console didn't help either), to more than double that for the base model would be ludicrous. It wouldn't surprise me if it's more expensive than $499 if they can justify it and if competition allows it, but again I think it would be pushing it and very risky if they don't have a cheaper base model to sell alongside it.
That ~$1000 figure is also pushing way too far into decent PC territory, which would strip the console of one of its key advantages, plus you have to remember many previously-exclusive Xbox games are now also available on PC anyway.
The problem with GPU chiplets isn't the size, it's the interconnection. It's something we'll likely see in the future at some point, I'm just not sure whether we'll see it on these consoles - the speculated core counts don't really demand it, and it would take considerable engineering work to implement it into Navi. Like any silicon engineering decisions, there would have to be a good reason to do it. No doubt, there's already a lot of extra work been put into the semi-custom part given they're expected to have hardware ray-tracing capability and MS/Sony historically make their own modifications regardless, but making it into chiplets would not be a trivial task. Again I've no doubt it's been considered, it's personally I think it's more likely than not we'll see the GPU on a single die this time. Could be wrong though!