Sony & Toshiba Disclose Cell Fab Plans

sean23007 writes "InfoWorld is running an article about Sony and Toshiba's plans for new fabrication plants to build the 'Cell' chip jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM for use in the Playstation 3 and other home entertainment uses. The new fabs will be located in Nagasaki and Oita, and both companies plan to spend $1.7 billion over the next 3-4 years in their construction. They will be capable of using 300 mm wafers with a 65 nm process. The chip is slated to be the first 1 teraflop consumer device."

Comments

Where's IBM in all this?

[Ra5pu7in]

Why are only Sony and Toshiba reported? Does IBM not plan to produce and Cell chips or do they already have fab facilities?

Re:cost justification

[sigep_ohio]

Well with the number of PS2's that have sold so far worldwide, I guess Sony thinks the demand for Cell will be even bigger. I know Cell won't be in the PS3, but since it is a scalar architecture it can be placed in anything from cell phones to video game machines to computers. This makes the market for Cell even larger than that of a Pentium or PowerPC or The Emotion Engine in PS2.

Re:cost justification

[watzinaneihm]

Atleast some part of the decision may be due to the culture of Sony
Sony (the original one, not their music division) have always been about making a product and then finding a market for it. They pride themselves on being the lone-wolves and hence came up with a lot of products which are completely non-standard (unless the world accepted their standards)the oft used betaMax being a good candidate. Sony's memory products today are a good example, they are tiny but are not interchangeable with others (not all prodcuts, but there are examples like their USB cables etc.) .A completely new chip for a game machine seems to fit right in, compared to MicroSoft moving to Celerons.
But then again they used to be able to come up with a product so good that they opened up whole new markets.
This post is partially based on a reading of "Made in Japan" by Akio morita, and I understand that decisions of Billions are not always decided by the "culture" of a company.

Re:cost justification

[Enigma2175]

Usually, with initial chip production at this scale, they lease out fab production time from other companies.

True, but what fab has the capabilities to produce the 65nm parts that they require for the chip? AFAIK, there aren't any current fabs that could produce the chips they want (at least not in volume).

That beats Intels 90nm fab out of the water

[mnmn]

And so does including memory and GPU with the CPU. You could imagine the desktop computer market for these babies.... if released with Linux.

Thinking of that, I wonder if they would allow hookup to a DVI connector, or replacing the BIOS, or adding PCI/ISA slots, or even producing whole chips for third party taiwanese boards that would then be built into workstations. If the chip is up to the spec, on time and reasonably priced, theres already a big Linux-based market for it, meself included. Saddams gotta steal only a FEW of these to build nukes. Wonder if an anarchist teen could do that with this christmas present.