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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."
Another article elsewhere already reported that this chip would not be available in time for use in the Playstation 3. - NCDave
According to IGN anyhow... To quote - Online news sites are reporting that the spring 2003 issue of Electronic Design Chain, an electronics trade magazine, features PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi on the cover, and also contains very surprising news about the Playstation 3. According to the reports, Kutaragi mentions that final production of the "Cell" chip, originally thought to be used in the PlayStation 3, may not be ready until 2007. He also confirms that the CPU in the PlayStation 3 will in fact not be the Cell processor, contrary to earlier reports. With a targeted PlayStation 3 launch in 2005/2006, delayed production of the Cell processor may have caused Sony to find a different solution for their next-generation console.
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I guess this answers all of the speculative questions on when the PS3 will be able to come out. If Toshiba needs four years for its 65nm production lines, then 2007 is the earliest point that wafers could start coming off the line. So Christmas 2007? Looks like the PS2 still has a very long life ahead of it.
...the "cell" chip won't be in the PS3.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
i expect that there will be lots of sony consumer electronics (dvd players, entertainment systems) embedded with ps3 technology. scea has been fighting to keep the ps series as a game console only, but MS is forcing them to integrate the ps3 with dvd/music/internet technology...
conversely, sometimes i wonder if MS is striving to be the north american Sony (tablet pc, xbox, windows ce, keyboards, mice, etc...)
With 1 Teraflop of processing power, I hope it'll come with more than 32MB RAM this time.
Why are only Sony and Toshiba reported? Does IBM not plan to produce and Cell chips or do they already have fab facilities?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
I'm sorry, but this conversation somehow went past me.
.02
Where in the article does any reference to wireless phones occur? And where in reality does a teraflop processor have its place in a phone?
The real question here for us ignorami like myself is, how will this processor stack up against PC processors- and will it run Linux?
Joking aside- and Beowulf clusters aside- this sounds like it could be a good idea for a versatile chip. If Toshiba's involved my guess is it will not be just for PS3, perhaps we'll now have another major plaer (or two) in the PC chip market? Hmm, Sony and Toshiba, leading laptop manufacturers, making their own chips. It's like Microsoft making keyboards and mice, I suppose, but perhaps better.
Just my
I used to work for Intel in the Fab automation software department and I find it hard to believe they're can justify investing this much to start up new fabrication plants for an unproven product.
Usually, with initial chip production at this scale, they lease out fab production time from other companies. Only huge production plans (like Pentiums or PowerPCs) generally justify building entire new Fabs. Plus, with the world economy slow, there's plenty of capacity at the world's fabs. Here's a good article on fab capacity
Why do I h8 apple?
They should just transcribe the Final Fantasy combat system into a hardware implementation. That's the only reason people buy these things anyway.
I propose that the limit break be implemented by some sort of register overflow.
They should do this in the Cell chips that are rumored, in the future, to be deployed in various home appliances. I, for one, would be impressed when my dryer finishes the tumble cycle and then performs a super-attack on the toaster.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
What the hell are you talking about. Even if they "open sourced" the processor, how many open source developers do you know that have access to a 65nm Fab to play around with it.
That the move to 65nm fabrication would be due to the machine that'll be running a to-be-released version of Grand Theft Auto and not some military system or huge scientific cluster ;-)
-psy
Thank you for making my eyes bleed. I've always had a theory that improper text formatting could cause physical pain, and now it's been proven.
Thank you.
Also, I should clarify, not just cell phones, but all electronics should have better methods of recycling them. When you went out to buy that PS2, what happened with the PS died? Circuit boards have many elements that should not be in a standard landfill.
Considering Sony has updated the PS2 numerous times since the original, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up re-releasing it with the Cell chip just to screw with people's minds.
I'd not before seen "Fab" used for fabricating plant, but I did know the "fab" as a sort of 3-d fax machine that re-creates solid objects (in shape anyway). It laser-scans the original, and creates a solid copy (corn starch?) at the receiving end.
The item title gave me visions of a new breed of cell phone that could spew solid objects.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Even if this chip's architecture turns out to be a dud, they'll have plants ready to produce 65 nanometer processors. Eventually they'll have some chips running at 65 nanometers, and they'll have a fab ready to produce it. Worst case scenario is that they can sell their fab capabilities to other companies that want to run at 65 nanometers. The odds that these plants won't have a long run value seems pretty small to me.
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I mean the original PS was always able to play music CD's if i recall correctly.
So could the TurboGrafx CD, the Sega CD, the CD-i, the 3DO, and the Saturn. Had Sony not included Red Book CD audio playing in the original PlayStation, PSX buyers would have felt cheated.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://www.designchain.com/coverstory.asp?issue
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
It won't be called the PS3
The report of Nintendo's stake in the "PlayStation" name was a hoax.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You can put in a hardware implementation of all the stereotypical character types too. Moody Teenage Hero, Overly Happy Tomboy, Gruff Loner, Tough-but-Eventually-Helpless Love Interest...
Talk about "Emotion Engine".
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Anyone know what type of process will be used to get 65 nm lines? They make a vague reference to a process designed by three or four companies. I figure that at 65nm we're beyond DUV. EUV maybe? How small can traditional laser lithography get us?
All the game console companies sell it too. Remember all the things Sony said that ps2 could do ?
Real life looking characters!
128 bit processing ! Wow.
Supercool demos.
Wait one second. Alot of the Ps2 game aren't anywhere near as good looking Sony said they would be.
Don't get fooled . I will check the games before i believe the hype about how the processor can do so many trillions of polygons and how well it does textures.
cell,cell,cell,cell,ce,cell,cell,cellll,cell,ce
And now it wont be in the new Ps3!
Another example of the media buying into everything HOOK , LINE and Sinker!
We are fricking idiots. Don't trust what the game companies say but look at their actions.
Japan, Inc. in general is sitting on WADS of cash, with little place to put it that seems even worthwhile right now. Buying a new fab is as good as anything else. It's certainly better than building unused office space or whatever else japan has been doing lately. They want to dump shaky petrodollars and own tangible *stuff* that you can actually do work with, not think about making a plan to form a committee to design a thought process that might lead to establishing a think tank to contemplate how to trade other think tanks ideas around, which is what US busy-ness is doing now. Japan has learned it's lesson, and hard, on busy-work and dot bombs, the US is now entering phase two of that economic reality, one big giant step behind japan.
Next bubble to pop, real estate in the US. It already popped in Japan. Stocks are heading to pop too,once again, from pension over-exposure and global trade re-arrangement which forgets about lost customer spending money when they yank jobs and move them around in wholesale lots based on this-quarter priority levels of awarness. Slow, very, very gradual "free trade" could work, wholesale do-it-all-right-now sure ain't..
As to the chips, no idea what they will do with them, but the world in general seems to want more chips of every description, especially newer designs. Pretty soon hammers will come with chips in them, and forks. Who knows, seems the trends though.
If this baby runs linux or windoze, I think all the scientific research based on distributed computing ie. SETI@home and Foldings@Home can replace all their server farm with a bunch of PS3s. Each work unit can probably be processed within seconds. Drool.
Nagasaki hmmm
What kind of halflife will the PS3's have?
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Yeah, and tabbed browsing. Don't forget about that.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
"Well I for one am not buying it until it plays Ogg. "
Ugh. If I don't explain the joke, I'm off-topic. If I do explain it, I'm overrated
"Derp de derp."
My PS still hasn't died. It just sits, ruler of the coffee table (which is too far away from everything to allow it to be plugged into anything). I fully expect it to outlast my PS2 (which my girlfriend stole and currently has at her apartment; not that that has anything to do with my prediction of an early demise. Really.)
The Cell chip could function as a super microcontroller. For anyone who likes to build robots this could represent a huge leap forward. If it could be connected to some type of flash ram we might be able to home build bots with speech recognition and neural nets. The cell should give new bots more on board intelligence. Let's hope they aren't too expensive (under $500?).
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Considering there are currently no 65nm fabs in existence, these two will be the first, I doubt either of them do.