PS3 is not Sony's "Core business", sells chipfab to Toshiba

Chip fab is so expensive that they have only lost money. No return has come from their chip fab other than PS3 chips, which they can outsource cheaper in the future.

 

I agree with Taucias. When I worked at Digital(DEC) they sold off their ability to design and manufacture their Alpha chip technology - that was their future. But reality is that there are Asian plants who can get economy of scale by selling/manufacturing to many companies.

It's true that Digital went bellyup and became part of Compaq but the argument still stands.

Sony selling Cell plants is a sign of hardship but doesn't imply they're selling out.

 

I read about this a few days ago.....on my Wii.

 

well how about wii sales in Japan taking a dip over the last few weeks?
this week wii sold something like 20k units to PS3s 12k. what exactly is going on?

 

Everyone in Japan already owns 2 Wiis and don't feel like buying a 3rd? :shrug:

 

2 wiis?how?

 

I don't even think it is a case of hardship. Now that they are producing 65nm CELL chips, 45nm is the next target. To reach that is going to require Sony to completely redevelop their chip fab sites at an enormous cost. Why bother, when you can outsource it?

Outsourcing worked well for Microsoft. It's their hardware design that is faulty, not the chips they purchase.

PSP is stealing some sales ATM probably.

 

Apart from Sony is anyone else using CELL (rather then PowerPC) CPUs?

 

IBM are selling them to medical research and they are being used in heavy number crunching projects. Their idea is to get the 3.2Ghz chip down to 45nm and then put them in consumer electronics as a cheap high powered processor.

 

I believe this is the case, Sony'll get some cash selling the plants and cut some costs. I just hope they reduce the PS3's price a bit more as a result of all this.

I don't know the PS3 price development in Japan or the US but here in Europe we've only had one price drop, and I think the console still needs another reduction (along with some more games) to be really competitive.

 

The 3 developing partners have all either demonstrated/announced/released products using the Cell BE. IBM recently released a Blade server (QS 20), Toshiba are using the technology in their SPURS media processor, Sony obviously has the PS3 application & a company called Mercury has a number of cell based compute products shown on their website. Additionally, there have been some reports of academic supercomputer development, either using clusters of blade servers, or PS3s.