One-and-Only PS3 as Blu-Ray Player Thread - Page 13

Originally Posted by TomsHT

Whether it sells out in November or not I dont know. But I think it should do well with initial sales. There's gamer extremists that will buy every new console and BR wannabe's that are waiting to get it at almost half the price of the stand alone versions.

Originally Posted by Beerstalker

Finally the cost isn't all that much more if you compare it to a comperable Xbox 360. I figure $400 premium system with $200 HD DVD add on and you are at $600 just like the PS3. And the PS3 actually comes with a bigger hard drive and built in wireless networking doesn't it? (It's been a while since I've actually read the specs)

Originally Posted by BillP

(my teenage sons will not replace their PS2 with the PS3 at a $500-$600 price tag, and this price point will seriously reduce the number sold as holiday presents).

Originally Posted by gundyrat1

So which will be better a one box or 2 box solution?
kinda of like the ill fated Genesis 32X add-on

Originally Posted by zalahmar

Speaking of PS3, has anyone seen this link????

http://www.reed-electronics.com/elec...dustryid=21365

Apparantly, the PS3 processor at best has a 10-20% yield. The other 80% are not deemed good enough as a PS3 processor.

I wonder just how short the PS3 supply is going to be this November.

So much for the "Trojan Horse"

"Electronic News: What's the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?

Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you're lucky to get 10 or 20 percent. If you put logic redundancy on it, you can double that. It's a great strategy, and I'm not sure anyone other than IBM is doing that with logic. Everybody does it with DRAM. There are always extra bits in there for memory. People have not yet moved to logic block redundancy, though"

Electronic News: Let's look at design for manufacturability from a different standpoint. IBM has said it needs seven of the eight cores on the Cell processor to work for Sony's Playstation. Will there be an aftermarket for chips with fewer operational cores?
Reeves: There are a lot of chips with six cores operational, and we've been thinking about whether we should really throw all of those away. We also have a separate part number for chips with all eight cores good. The stuff that's going to be for medical imaging, aerospace and defense and data uses eight cores.

Electronic News: But might it be the less-expensive version of Playstation 3?
Reeves: It could, but I don't think Sony has thought about offering that. That doesn't mean there aren't good uses for a chip with four SPEs [synergistic processing elements].

Electronic News: What's the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?
Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you're lucky to get 10 or 20 percent. If you put logic redundancy on it, you can double that. It's a great strategy, and I'm not sure anyone other than IBM is doing that with logic. Everybody does it with DRAM. There are always extra bits in there for memory. People have not yet moved to logic block redundancy, though.

Electronic News: Do any of those cores ever go bad, so that you start out with seven and you wind up with six or five?
Reeves: There's a reliability failure rate for all chip types. By definition, reliability failure is one point circuit that has failed. If it happens to be in an SPE, it will knock out one of the cores. We have electronic fuses now, rather than laser fuses, which you can only blow when you're doing wafer tests. Electronic fuses you blow electrically. If you really want to be focused on reliability and up-time availability, you can design one of these chips to self-detect. You can ship it with eight cores working, blow one of them, and from a user perspective you would have self-healed it in the field.

Electronic News: But would it be as fast as the chip with eight cores?
Reeves: Yes, because the Playstation 3 only uses seven of them. You'd have a spare. That isn't implemented in Cell, but it could be. We implemented that same strategy for IBM systems. If you take a logic hit on a chip, you don't have any impact on performance because there is enough redundancy built in.

Electronic News: What happens if one of the cores blows on the Sony Playstation 3 if there are only seven to start with?
Reeves: It's just like a reliability failure on your TV or DVD recorder. If it's within warranty, you send it back. If it's not, your game doesn't work anymore. You'll always have choices about how reliable you want to make a chip with burn-in. Most chips that go into the consumer marketplace on things such as camcorders or DVD players aren't burned in.But you can add burn-in and improve reliability 5x to 10x. It's extra cost. Certainly, a company like Sony adds that in.

Electronic News: How much extra cost?
Reeves: It's variable. On DRAMs and SRAMs, it's cents. On processors, because they're so high-powered, it's not trivial to power 100 or 1,000 at a time. With all the wattage, it can be dollars.

Electronic News: With the price Sony is going to charge, it can easily add that into the cost.
Reeves: Sony is very concerned about quality and backward compatibility. They want to get this right. They tested game after game after game. When there were about 40 Playstation 1 games that didn't work properly, that didn't pass their criteria for quality.

Electronic News: So does that mean the current Playstation 2 systems have a Cell processor?
Reeves: No, they have a 440 Power processor. It's a 130-nanometer, single-core ASIC chip. It's the same technology as if you buy a Sony DVD or a Sony Bravia TV. Sony is replacing all the Mips design points with Power design points.



Clarification
Tom Reeves, IBM's VP of semiconductor and technology services, said he was not making any specific references to past or current Cell yields in an executive insight interview that ran last week. He was, instead, referring to large die yield challenges in general and the successful leverage provided by logic redundancy strategies. IBM does not release product specific yield information. This clarification was made on July 14, 2006.

THE CELL PROCESSOR is steadily being shoved out the door of IBM plants, despite reports of poor yields.
Sources have informed the Inq that IBM executives have told employees within the firm, that yields are "on or above" targets.

Yields for a large, complex part like the Cell are expected to be low at the start of production and improve steadily thereafter - if IBM had allowed for a very low yield to start with, its plausible that the rumours of bad yields were entirely accurate and this is what IBM was expecting all along.

The exec also said IBM had shipped the first full allotment to Sony under a 'take or pay' arrangement (whereby Sony has the obligation of either taking delivery of the goods or paying a specified amount), and that Sony must have "quite a stockpile of the processors in a warehouse somewhere".

Presumably the warehouse has close links to Asustek, where recently other sources released details of Asustek plans to deliver 4 million units of the PS3 console to Sony this month. µ

Originally Posted by aaronwt

Where did 4 million units come from? They just started building them last month. You can't make that many that fast.

Originally Posted by briankmonkey

and this "IBM claims Cell production is now going well - Yields back on track"