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PlayStation 3 Delayed, Over $800?
AWhiteFlame writes "Cnet is reporting that a research report issued by Merrill Lynch suggests that the Sony PlayStation 3's American release may be postponed until 2007. From the article: 'The analyst firm proposed the idea that high costs and Sony's decision to use an 'ambitious new processor architecture--the Cell' is making it look like the company might not be able to meet its goal of getting the PS3 out in the U.S. this year.' Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment." The official report (pdf) would also seem to indicate that the console will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 when it launches.
I'm not an insider by any means, nor a PS "fan boy," but isn't it likely that this is just very intelligent marketing by Sony? It's generally accepted that a game console launching at $900 (hell, $600), isn't going to happen in this day and age of mass market acceptance being an essential requirement of the development of any piece of electronics. This falls right in line with the Blueray machine costs . . . make it seem like astronomically expensive hardware fit for a king, and then release them at a fraction of the price, and sooner. I don't care when they release it, but I'm betting it will be this year, and at a $500 price point or lower.
Apple just did it with the Intel switch. First they've started releasing the stuff 6 months earlier than they said they would, and now their upgrading the processor clock speeds for free. Who wants to bet that wasn't in the writing already for the entire gestation of their Intel plans. If there were two companies I would compare hype-capabilities apple-to-apple (sorry), it would be Apple and Sony.
A B A C A B B
Maybe by 2007 Xbox 360s will actually be in some stores around here, and then I can have my choice.
...come to those who wait.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
If they want to compete with anyone, it will be much much cheaper than that
That will be to expensive to do games for PS3 that many corporation that does games will broke and can't run with PS3.
http://www.michel.eti.br
...the report says basically "we don't know anything, but we think it's hard, so they won't make it."
Right. Remind me to call them nextx time I need random guesswork done.
...more than anything like Merril Lynch is trying to get people to dump Sony stock so they can buy it up, then make a killing if the PS3 matches their REAL expectations. Or maybe I have my tinfoil hat wrapped a little tightly?
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
doesn't it make sense that they will just lose the money on the console and attempt to make it back on the games, similar to what microsoft is doing with the xbox? i suppose the point is that they would lose more money per console than microsoft is losing per xbox?
Damn, my first car cost less than that. Granted, it was a piece of shit, and it didn't have the latest and greatest Cell HypeEngine® built in, but it did have a nice big back seat (wink, wink), which produced a lot more fun than any Sony equipment I've ever owned.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Excellent post above about Apple to Sony.
Hype how expensive the machine is and how much good stuff is there, and then make it look like a bargain when they come out as 600 dollars! Look you saved 30%!
Shit, for that amount of money, I might as well just get a new PC.
Maybe call it the 'Neo Geo'. :P
...pointing out that this is clever marketing from Sony, or this is just some whacky stuff from Wall Street, remember that the analysts who wrote this report make their livings and substantial salaries from analysing their target companies. They know these companies inside out, because if they didn't they would be out of a job before they knew. When you consider their balls are really in a vice grip because if they get their predictions their wrong, their companies stand to lose a lot of money, then you give a bit more credence to reports of this nature.
Having read the pdf file, the analysis seems quite reasonable, and well considered, and utltimately quite persuasive. Whether it persuades you is a different matter, but before you dismiss the report out of hand, remember that the authors spend a lot of time trying to understand and predict what Sony is going to do, and therefore are better qualified than most third parties to reach conlcusions about slippages and prices.
Those are just speculation. Facts are, there isn't a release date nor a price set. That's all.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
the console will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 when it launches.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 to build when it launches.
Developers: We can use your help.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
IBM must be having fab problems with Cell at 90nm. Perhaps they want to wait for the transition to 65nm for better quality control. I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
If this is true it will give MS and the 360 a huge advantage in the marketplace. Further, I don't think Cell is going to be significantly more powerful than the Xenon, even with single precision floating point (the vast majority of Cell die space). I think IBM and Sony really stumbled here, both from a technology perspective - and now from a manufacturing and quality control perspective.
Wow. Maybe Microsoft really has kicked both their asses. In everything, from new technology, manufacturing, and time to market. Sheesh!
This article states the cost to manufacture the PS3 will be 900 bucks, not the MSRP. All this means is that Sony is taking a big loss on each console. This isn't anything newsworthy.
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The Revolution is definitely coming out before at least thanksgiving, and definitely under $300. Why get somthing with fewer but more expensive games that, all on top of that, costs 2-4 times more?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Of course, to stay competetive, Sony will never sell the PS3 for what it cost to build it, but this really does put a question mark on how low they can afford to go.
The report also speculates on the ramifications for other companies, such as Nvidia, ATI, EA and others. It's a good read.
The article states that $900 is the cost to Sony. It won't cost that retail, they always take a hit. The original Xbox cost more to make, than it sold for. It's called a loss leader, look it up.
The $900 figure is the estimated BOM at launch, not
the retail price.
The BOM is figuring $350 for the BluRay drive,
and $230 for the Cell processor.
It 'aint $900 worth of special, though.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Anything above 600$ will hurt, as my wife would try to kill me...
The report comes up with the $900 estimate by summing up cost estimates for each of the components, but its estimates for the prices of those components is overly pessimistic. In particular, it predicts that the Blu-Ray drive will cost $350 initially (!?), that the CPU will cost $230 initially, and that the unit will not be sold at a loss. They don't say how they arrived at those, but $350 for an optical drive in bulk is not believable at all. If Blu-Ray drives cost anywhere near that much, then the PS3 will ship without them. A more reasonable estimate is that the PS3 will cost $500 at launch, and come down to $300 quickly.
The playstation is primarily a games machine. As such, it's parents buying them for their kids. Once you include a couple of initial release games, dropping $1000+ on the new console is not gonna happen. No matter how much little Johnny screams. $400-500, maybe. A grand? Not a chance.
My son is firmly entrenched in the playstation camp. PS1, PS2, PSP. Given the choice between a 360 now, or a PS3 later, he'd rather wait for the PS3. But for $1000? Tough luck, dude. Not happenin'.
(Yes, there are the fools who bought PS2 and 360 consoles for $1000+ on release day from some guy on eBay, but those are abberations.)
If its true then thats the end for PS, and MS wins again, just ask Nintendo. Im sure by the time it comes out xbox360 will have come down in price as well.
...I find it completely ironic that their official report gets simple addition wrong.
Sony may as well have declared defeat. There is no market for a $900 gaming machine no matter how cool it is. Period.
We've already got $2000 gaming computers, we don't want your Cell. I bought a PS2 for Final Fantasy games... but I'm just not going to pay $900 for any game developer.
Even if Sony had ALL the good games, which it doesn't... I would not pay $900 for an oversized atari regardless of it's media capabilities! We've all got dvd players and mp3 players!
Lame. Super super lame.
OR... they realize that by 2007 the dollar won't be worth anything compared to the Yen... so they're just being realistic.
------------
Take your pick.
Well, have you considered that "investing" in fabs usually comes with money being spend, which in turn has to be got back somehow?
A modern fab cost 2-3 billion. Thats quite a few $ per cell to get a break even.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The Cell isn't hype at all. There's a recent article in Forbes that goes into details, and compares it to modern electronics, and it's not a gimmick. It already works in several other devices, and the performance is amazing. The XBox will look like it's one (or more) generations behind when the PS3 hits. The PS3 might be the next big step in gaming, as far as graphics goes. I'd probably pay upwards of $1000 for one when it comes out. That's still cheaper than a bleeding edge computer needed to play any of the ridiculously bloated PC games out there.
I don't respond to AC's.
You're guilty of the same thing. You don't state why their numbers are not believable, nor how you arrive at your $500 estimate, nor the reasoning for how it would be easy for them to cut the price by 40% quickly.
The Big Mac Indexo ry.cfm?story_id=5389856
http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/displaySt
The Economist uses it to keep track of prices around the world.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
At E3 last year; "analysts" specualated a $500-800 price. Then as the year went on, news about CELL fabs near completion; and PR about CELL being used in something other than the PS3, dropped the price speculation down to $300-500 range. Now that the RSX is complete and supposed production issues since nobody has actually seen the finalized board design (is it even done?), price speculation is rising.
Though the $60-70 games speculation as crappy as it sounds; doesn't sound unrealistic.
Ob SONY joke:
SONY="Soon Only Not Yet"
While xbox 360 is positioned decently well, it hasn't had the landslide success people were expecting. At the price point sony may come in at, and the lateness... nintendo may well regain the home-console throne, at least in numbers. Mass appeal to non-hardcore gamers, low entry cost, *REAL* backwards compatibility are going to make the revolution an easy sell.
Let's say the console costs Sony $750, because they get deals for bulk-buys, co-investment with IBM, etc. Now, I'd say that $500 is the maximum market price, because I'd be able to get a 360 and a Revolution together for about that in 2007. So Sony takes a $250 loss on the units. Let's say they get liscense fees of $20 per $50/60 game. That means that the consumer is expected to buy 13 expensive games at retail price? Some how I don't see that. I mean, that requires a lot of "must-have" games. That's a big gamble for Sony, seeing as there's a lot of backwards compatibility, and I don't see people buying a dozen $50 games, except over a long time frame.
Be reasonable. You're posting on slashdot.
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The more I read about Cell the less enthusiastic I am about the design. It's just eight SIMD vector units tuned best for calculating single precision floats. The local memory store seems more a hindrance than an advantage, especially at only 256KB a pop. The EIB interconnect bus is quite fast, but moving data in and out of each SPE from main RAM requires a DMA transfer for each operation. s-l-o-w. And finally you have the PPE, a basic PPC with the out of order execution unit hacked away yet keeping the traditional VMX (Altivec) unit. Why didn't they toss the VMX unit and try to keep OOE? For that matter, why did they need eight SPEs? Die space is already way too big at 90nm!
Gotta say: Microsoft is already in the game and taking marketshare. Sony better act quickly, or they're gonna lose this round.
The PlayStation 3 will offer nothing more over the PlayStation 2 than the X-Box 360 offers over its predecessor. I think the next major leap forward will be real-time photo-realistic graphics, and I think everyone would agree that's not going to happen for at least a few more generations at best; it may never happen.
Wake up guys, that was too much... It look like Holywood villains...
I bet on MS FUD and Sony kick ass in 2006 with proper machine...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
We have always been chasing the 'gaming experience that puts the other two consoles to shame' feeling, but that feeling doesnt last that long, on any console. Its not the hardware that makes the games, its the gameplay.
Has anyone else noticed that the latest round of consoles are actually getting more expensive than PC's. Sorry, but when a console costs more than a quality laptop, im out!
--Imagine every Thursday shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers.
"someone is reporting that someone else heard someone say something about the ps3." Dear god.
I wish people would quit repeating this myth. Only 3 consoles have ever been sold at a loss: the Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast, and the Xbox (well, probably 4 now, I assume they're taking a loss on the 360 also). Losing money on console hardware is NOT the norm, and it's something only Sega and Microsoft have done. And look at what happened to Sega when they did that. Here's an article that has a decent rundown on the subject. It was last updated in 2003, but nothing has really changed since then. http://www.actsofgord.com/Proclamations/chapter02. html
The thing that is interesting to me here is this: For the last year, people have been repeating the factoid that the PS3 will apparently cost $500 to produce. If you spend a little bit of time digging, though, you'll find that all such claims ultimately stem from a single oft paraphrased-and-then-meta-paraphrased report by Merrill Lynch about halfway through last year.
Now Merrill Lynch says the PS3 will cost $900 to produce.
I can only conclude that the amount Merrill Lynch believes the PS3 will cost to produce approximately doubles every nine months. At this rate, by the end of 2006 Merrill Lynch will believe the PS3 costs $2000 to produce, and by the end of the PS3's lifespan Sony will be paying a full $4,551,111 per unit to manufacture the PS3.
Clearly, Sony has a serious problem here.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's the PARTS at LAUNCH. Not the sale price. Not the build price. Just the parts....at LAUNCH. Also note, the parts price drops to around $300 at year three. I suspect the price drop will be non-linear in favor of lower costs, so it's very conceivable the AVERAGE price of the parts over the production run would be under $500.00. Throw in a market share loss equation, and the unit will sale go for under $500.00 (factoring in manufacturing costs as well), which will be competitively priced against the 360.
There is no way a game machine can sell for $900. You can buy a new, full PC for 1/2 of that price. You can buy new Playstation 2 or XBox for $199, used for $79. Basically I think public perception expects a $200 machine, maybe $300 but not beyond that as it's becoming close to the price of a full desktop computer which can be used for other things too.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Promises, promises... we've heard that each and every console will deliver "a gaming experience that puts all others to shame".
Two words: BLAST PROCESSING.
Add up the numbers in the column. It only adds to $800.
This report is way way off.
Additionally:
The only thing worse here than M-L's estimate of the price of the PS3 this year is their estimate of it in 3 years.
Let's start from this year.
$230 seems high for just the CPU. I couldn't say how much, but I can say that Sony wouldn't even bother to make their console if the CPU cost half over half of the expected selling price.
The Blu-Ray drive price is WAY too high. Philips is going to ship a Blu-Ray writer drive for $500 in May. That's $500, retail. That includes retail markup, and cost of shipping to retailer. Also, Philips pays Blu-Ray license fees to produce units and Sony doesn't. And did I mention the Philips writes and the PS3 only has to read? And I can buy a quality DVD-Writer for under $40 retail right now. A Blu-Ray reader drive is a little different, but not a lot. It cannot cost much over $100, and it'll be well below that by fall, when the PS3 production ramps up (or perhaps just begins in earnest, I dunno).
6 USB ports? It will not have that many. 4 tops (2 front, 2 back). And the connector cost seems high, I'd say $3 today for USB ports, maybe $2.
For 802.11g and ethernet, Sony is using IP from Marvell that is normally used as an 802.11 access point. So it has all 3 ethernet ports and the 802.11g (and an ethernet hub) in a single chip (or less, see below). I'd say $5 for the ethernet and 802.11g together, maybe a bit more if they really leave 3 connectors on the back.
If the $100 was for a hard drive, they're the dumbest people alive. I can get a 40GB 2.5" drive for well under $100 retail. The OEM price cannot be over $50, and they could always go to under 40GB if it saves money. I'll just assume they added wrong.
I think also M-L doesn't understand that when you make a custom chip you can put a lot of stuff on it. The link (brains) for the USB, 802.11 and ethernet are probably on the main chip in the unit, bringing the cost of them down to nearly free. The 802.11 PHY/radio will probably be a separate chip, but the USB PHY is certainly on board, maybe the gigE one too.
So M-L is well over the initial price here.
Now, let's look at the future prices.
$100 for an OEM Blu-Ray reader in 3 years? Unpossible. Blu-Ray would have to be the biggest flop in the world for this to happen. My guess is you'll be able to buy a Blu-Ray writer drive for less than $60 in 3 years at retail. Look at how DVD writer prices collapsed. Readers will probably be under $40 retail. OEM prices for either will be even lower. And again, Sony doesn't have to pay license fees, so that lowers their prices even further.
$60 for the main chip in 3 years seem high too. It'll be on 65nm or lower then, yields will be way up, chip size down, and they might even combine chips (like the GS and EE were combined into a single chip on PS2 in under 3 years). I couldn't say how high though. Maybe it'll be $50, but include the functions of some of the other chips in it.
$30 for 512MB of RAM 3 years from now. Seriously? That's way off. GDDR3 will not be special anymore, and Sony won't be paying much premium for XDR, since they'll have enough volume to make a market in it. Right now you can get 32M of mobile SDRAM for $4 in big quantities, 64M of mobile SDRAM for $5. And I'm to think 512MB of commodity RAM will be $30 in 3 years? Nope.
Again, they don't know the PS3 uses a single set of IP for Ethernet and WiFi, $7 between the two 3 years from now is way too high. I'd say $2 for the PHYs, links will certainly be on with another chip.
$5 for Bluetooth in 3 years? It won't drop at all? Smooth move.
These companies stink at estimating parts costs. Just remember, these are stock brokers, not engineers, not parts buyers. They just don't have any clue at all.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Additionally the cell will be used by IBM for things like blade servers and medical devices. So while the initial launch may be rather painful for Sony and cost Sony a lot of money, economies of scale do apply, and the cost will fall. With the use in medical devices for example, I would suspect that Sony and IBM will use that as a major source of revienue to help pay back development costs.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
a research report issued by Merrill Lynch suggests that the Sony PlayStation 3's American release may be postponed until 2007 [...] The official report (pdf) would also seem to indicate that the console will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $900
Is this the same Merrill Lynch that was accused of lying about the health of corporations such as Worldcom and Enron? The same Merrill Lynch that agreed to pay $100 million in fines? The same Merrill Lynch that may owe several billions of dollars to institutional shareholders and others for gross deception?
Remind me why I, you, or any news outlet for that matter, should have any faith in their statements?
With Toshiba, Sony and IBM all putting cell's in various electronic devices (TV's, computers, consoles, etc.) the long term costrs will come down significantly.
Even if expensive at launch, Sony is probably looking at the longer term picture.
...for being insightful, intelligent, and well-reasoned.
Bonuses for the meeting planners and team players! Layoffs to be announced! *clap clap* There's cake in the conference room!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
That's 'cause it'll be 35 times bigger.
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It'd better have some excellent mods available.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
The column adds up to $800 and they have $900 under it. A pretty obvious mistake from financial ANALysts.
I'm curious what medical devices would require a Cell CPU.
Otherwise Cell is being marketed as a niche scientific chip, and the volumes in those markets will be next to nothing when compared with the PS3.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
what is
230 + 70 + 350 + 50 + 0 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 80
It looks like 800 by my calculator.
Good math M-L... I'll make sure never to trust your advice again.
In the back seat you were at risk of contracting any number of things, but not a rootkit.
Quite a misleading headline. Sony wouldn't dream of trying to sell a system for $800 plus. Perhaps that figure is refering to actual cost per unit, I.E how much of a loss they are selling at? A quick google shows that Xbox 360s actual cost is in the $750 range, so this is nothing unexpected, what with all that blu-ray cell chip crap they are supposedly throwing in there...
My guess? This is pure hyperbole, and Sony will have this sucker out by Christmas 2006 at the latest.
it's all true
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If this really retails for more than $500, Sony stands to lose more than the game market. HD-DVD is getting ready to debut, with a Toshiba player having an opening street price of around $400 (or less). Blu-ray is opening with a price target of $1000, probably a little less. If the PS3 does not succeed, Blu-ray is, in my opinion, likely lost. An expensive PS3, will limit adoption of Blu-ray and of the PS3. Sony will be ready to take a huge loss on its initial release, and take a huge gamble. But with a cost of $900, there may be no hope.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
A lot of articles on games wind up being simply trolling where one console or another is bashed. I really hate the unending stream of those.
.advocacy newsgroups on Usenet, where people who want to flame people who like console A or console B can flame to their hearts' content without bothering people who aren't interested in console advocacy.
However, I don't want to filter out games.slashdot.org, because there are often interesting articles from game developers or on the game industry.
What we need is consoleadvocacy.slashdot.org, like the
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I had a divorce. Now, my game console, the internet and miss Right brings me all the joy I need.
Cost of parts is not the whole picture. How much do the manufacturing, the warehouse, the shipping, the import duties, and the retail markup figure into the price? I'd say at least $100.
I still love the name. Calling a chip fab (or any factory) "Fishkill." ;)
"its a trap" -sony
MRI and CT scanners, next generation ECG and EEG monitors, radiology workstations for the first two.
There are all kinds of things Cell could be used in. Note that a radiology workstation currently is usually a PC, often running Linux with some badly designed software on it that usually costs upwards of $100,000. LOTS of margin.
Everything I find on the Internet sounds positive on cell mfg., including systems shipping by Mercury systems in 2q and IBM in 3q.
Do you have any evidence to backup this claim?
Nah, you're confusing inflation and wages. The walmart worker will still bring home minimum wage, net ~$200, the only difference will be that minimum-wage living expenses, once ~$200, will now be around $900. Of course, they'll still be able to survive, it's just that the difference will be paid by government programs, with an appropriate premium, as with all government run programs. (I.e., rent won't cost actually cost much more, but the bureaucracy will have forced it several fold higher.) Everyone will cheer, because the increases will go to the largest wall street companies, an nobody will care much about smaller companies getting the shaft. :)
.
In other words, it'll be the late 90's "boom" again!
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
You'd probably wonder what fields of medical research use SGI boxes as well, but if you've ever stepped foot in that industry you would find tons of SGI boxes specifically made for super high end graphics all over the place.
And finally you have the PPE, a basic PPC with the out of order execution unit hacked away yet keeping the traditional VMX (Altivec) unit. Why didn't they toss the VMX unit and try to keep OOE?
Because out-of-order execution will ultimately result in instructions being reordered the same way each time. If an optimizer can predict this reordering, such as through a hardware simulation, then it can save this order and generate object files that are already in an optimal order. As I understand it, out-of-order is primarily intended to squeeze out a bit more performance when running programs that were compiled for a different microarchitecture (e.g. 486 1-pipe vs. Pentium 1 UV vs. Pentium 2/3/M 4-1-1 rule vs. the mess that is Pentium 4).
Except the fact that Sony probably isn't stupid and planed this term a little longer.
It is a no brainer that if PS3 fails, those 2-3 billion are lost. Normal logic would say it is better to have longer period of returning funds than going for a 50-50 game. And even (for example number of Macs sold) very low average of 5 million of consoles sold in one year, would give a lot of money back with games (I don't know for others, but in one year I buy 15-20 games. All my friends buy more than that. But then again some buy none. Taken out the fact that downloading of the game on BR will be ludicrously long, more people will buy originals). Lifecycle of PS3 is 5 years. Meaning, with Mac average they would probably return money invested with some earnings.
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Twice the MSRP of Toshiba.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
Medical imaging with ultrasound. I've read that they are working on 3-d displays that are easier to interpret by non-specialists.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You might be right if these boys were specialist IT analysts, but they aren't they are financial analysts making a series of pretty big assumptions that don't match reality. These are also the folks that hyped the .com as the future and didn't spot the gaming market or mobile markets (don't believe me go and look at the reports from 1999).
So we have the Cell... currently for sale on development boxes... so not quite experimental
We have blue-ray price of $350 a unit, some what odd given that you can already get BURNERS for under $1000. And these are at the low volume end while the PS3 will be high volume.
Then we get the slip until 2007. This is based on the Cell being too new (its in production) and some assumptions.
So in terms of who I'd trust around it? Me I'd go for the IEEE who reckoned that the Cell would be one of the hits of 2006, but hell they are only the most established electronics and computer organisation on the planet.
Don't trust analysts, remember most of them don't beat the market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Send out reports now saying the console will cost $900, Generate a lot of OMG THAT'S TOO MUCH!!!! Fan fare, then couple weeks before it launches, cut it half, sell it for $400-450, While we all are amazed at the deal! They've adjust nothing and intended to sell it for that price to begin with. It's called marketing :)
oogly boogly!
Depending on the performance $900 may be worth it. They may not be able to sell that to 14 year olds, but if the cell is server-worthy and kicks the ass of Athlon64, its damn well worth the price. I'm thinking along the lines of using it as a PC as well.
Of course if all its good at is games, I'll wait till I find one for under $400 CAD
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Dvorak or some other idiot that claims to be an expert in the tech field - and forget to mention that the time when they were actually an expert was 20 years ago when a proc any faster than 15 MHz cost thousands?
Right now in retail stores the 360 is costing almost $700.
I knew a guy who bought a 3DO for SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS when it first came out. (Mind you, this was Canadian dollars, but that was still well over $500 US at the time.)
Anyway, as much as Sony's bugging me lately, the headline is pure FUD. Sony will eat the extra cost just to get it onto the market, and in a year the manufacturing cost will drop to a reasonable level.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
PS3 is looking more and more like the Sega Saturn.
Premium XBox 360 games are retailing for $60 now. I would fully expect that price point for the PS/3.
Instead of $900, result is $800
And before posting about other expenses like storage, packaging... Second result $320 is correct. Meaning in 3 years costs would be the same.
It is a sad world when 7 analysts is not enough for simple addition.
If producers of Numb3rs will be looking for new cast, well Merril Linch are the perfect match for braindead victims.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
BOYCOTT SONY Playstation
BOYCOTT SONY games
BOYCOTT SONY cameras
BOYCOTT SONY laptops
BOYCOTT SONY video equipment
BOYCOTT SONY music
BOYCOTT SONY CDs
BOYCOTT SONY DVDs
BOYCOTT SONY artists
BOYCOTT SONY Vaio PCs
BOYCOTT SONY stereos
BOYCOTT SONY HDTVs
BOYCOTT SONY Radios
BOYCOTT SONY EVERYTHING.
And the same goes for all BMG and SONY/BMG products too.
Root kit THEIR 4th quarter profits!
n00bs
Either the guy at Merril was on drugs or Sony is but anything over 400 would put it in the NO DAMN WAY I AM GOING TO BUY IT catagory. above 300, I will have to see what kind of games they will have. Then again, maybe I should get an Xbox
Actually, previous articles have said that Sony has proclaimed that the lifecycle for the PS3 will be 10 years, not 5. Think about it, if ML is right and it doesn't come out till 2007 in the US, we're looking at between 6-7 years for the PS2, so why not 9-10 for the PS3. Granted, with how fast Microsoft is moving, Xbox 4 should beat PS4 to the market.
I've been quite excited because of all it's features. But I'm beginning to realize how blind I've been to the truth. If they really do allow it to do _anything_ other then play games, there will almost certainly be a considerable price attached with those features, since the only reason consoles are affordable at launch (selling for less then they cost to make) is that they know they will get the money back in royalties for each game made for the system. Allowing it to be a non-subscriber PVR or a Linux computer with an active dev. community is highly unlikely at launch now that I realize it wouldn't be very economical for them (since those targets may buy few if any games). For the full-feature device I want, I may literally see a price closer to $800 then $400 (I am envisioning something like the XBox 360's system, but with greater steps due to manufacturing costs, and not just taking advantage of understandably cheap parents that will force their kid to spend $200 for the extra features of the expensive XBox 360 down the road). They haven't announced if Linux will be included, so I'm expecting an add-on kit for $150 or something like that, and the PVR service to be subscriber based (Since it's a cash-cow considering all they have to provide is listings and a few other services). I had high hopes, but I've just realized those hopes will probably either be shot down and not part of the PS3 at all, available at launch for a significant price, or not available until later in it's life.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
slashdot, engadget, and boingboing posters spend a year arguing about whether an Xbox360 will cost $300 or $1200 or somewhere inbetween. Will the DS battery life last 1 hour or 72 hours? I myself am guilty, because I am interested in technology and video games.
But when the freakin thing comes out with limited games, burns carpets, and does not seem like a huge jump above current PC technology (talking about 360 not DS), I am a little disappointed. For example, I have an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with an ATI X800 video card and can run Need for Speed Hot Pursuit to look and feel almost the same as the XBOX 360. When a PC can do all the 360 can do and more, and a laptop can do all the DS can do and more, why do people bother spending money on these gadgets? Surely, teaching a kid how to use a PC (gaming included) is bestoying upon him/her a much broader skillset than showing him/her how to use a DS or PSP. In fact, the recent announcement that Opera is going to port its browser to the DS underscores this point that PCs are superior.
How about making consoles do unique things with videogames? Offer cool accessories like video game goggles that immerse the gamer in their experience; or the possibility of betting on live game matches and using those points towards something tangible? This might be a rant but I just don't see the point...anyone?
Martini Glasses
if you look at the X-box 360 launch, there was a huge shortage of consoles and people we're re-selling them on ebay for 3 or 4 times the retail price. Is it that unrealistic to think that Sony took note and figures that since people we're paying that much for xbox's on ebay that they might as well charge an arm and a leg for the initial shipment?
Think about it, if ML is right
They obviously can't do simple addition right. Second is, though. Meaning any extra expense is impossible.
and it doesn't come out till 2007 in the US, we're looking at between 6-7 years for the PS2, so why not 9-10 for the PS3. Granted, with how fast Microsoft is moving, Xbox 4 should beat PS4 to the market.
Like now? They beat with release date, so what? Mostly everybody I know is waiting PS3. I don't know single person who bought 360, but I know at least 50 people already waiting in line for the first shipment of PS3 (me included).
And I expect (or at least hope for) some serious revamp of complete gaming tech in 10 years (even before that).
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
That was a highly informative post.
Let's think: They take the hit - lose 400 bucks per machine.
On each game they sell, they cash in x dollars.
They have online gaming produce revenue.
Their BluRay standard becomes the market leader - and they make y dollars on each BluRay disc they sell. Having BluRay succeed also makes them money elsewhere - in selling BluRay units and BluRay production systems.
Given the scale of the PS3 project, they might yet pull it off. However, it looks like they are betting the farm.
Stop the brainwash
At least it'll be out before DNF.
If Sony is going to delay the launch of the PS3 so that they "get it right", so be it.
It's bad enough when you buy a personal computer and there's some sort of flaw or bug in the hardware, but I can imagine that it would a lot worse if it was a console.
I won't be buying a PS3 on general principal and because I prefer playing games on my personal computer, but it would be nice to see Sony take their time and do something right by their customers by releasing a console that is designed and built to be, for want of a better word, perfect.*
So what if it costs $900? A lot of people need to realise that a console computer is not a toy, it is a "real" computer that only differs from that box on their desk by having a different OS and interface, and that if people want games that blow them out of their chair, they'll pay for it, either now, or later through upgrades.
Remember, Sony's number one priority is to their shareholders, and then their customers, but, we can hope that with the PS3 they show that those two priorities are not as distant from each other as the DRM fiasco would suggest.
2007 release date? Those who would complain about it need to learn patience. Your PS2 is not going to suddenly become unusable tomorrow - saving the event of some major hardware flaw or some twit with a spilled drink - so just wait, play your games, and use this time to save up so that when the PS3 debuts you can go down to the store, plonk down $900, $1,100, or even $1,500 on the counter and say,
`Give me one of d'ose new `puter things from Sony, da one I plug into my tv and play all da games wid, and some gimme some shootin' games too. Er, can I get the Intarweb with dat?'
Ah consumerism culture...
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Someone please do the right thing and mod both of this AC's posts up to +5, informative. They're the most interesting posts in the entire forum.
Merrill Lynch is about as trustworthy as Shadow from FF3: They'd slight their own mama's throat for a dime!
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Put together a PC and high res monitor for that price
The first game title to be released for the Sony PS3 will be titled "Wall Street Fighter". In this multiplayer game, players use a virtual "Internet" to discuss, predict and ultimately manipulate the retail price of unreleased video game consoles, amassing vast fortunes by buying and selling futures.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Wow. Who wrote this thing? Ballmer? Anyway, two points:
How does Merryl Lynch know how much components cost Sony? They can know how much a Cell processor would cost you and me, but don't you think IBM would be cutting them some sort of deal? Has this deal been announced to the public so as to allow a specific cost per unit? Maybe. Sounds odd to me, though.
And secondly, I refuse to take seriously any video game article that call this next round the fifth generation of consoles. I guess Meryll Lynch thinks video games started when the NES did.
Microsoft's XBox 360 doesn't have OOE either. That's why someone reveals their ignorance when they say "IBM put 3+Ghz G5s in the XBox, why didn't Apple wait?" Removing things like OOE makes it easier to jack up clockspeed.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Oh well I guess I'll hang out and see if the xbox 720 has compelling enough features for me to buy it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Fraud! The real Andrew Tanenbaum would not be installing Linux, he would be porting MINIX to it if he had one.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Compilers can't optimize to reduce branching
Yes they can. I'll shed a bit more light on the AC's explanation:
And, of course, with each branch comes a stall as fetches have to go out to main RAM - not cache.
Not necessarily. If your main inner loop has a mispredicted branch, then it can still restart and read instructions from the correct point in the instruction cache. You lose the prefetch queue, but you still have an instruction cache and a comparatively huge (software defined) L2 cache.
How Sony is going to make back the $400 it'll lose on each Ps3 but that's just silly.
They might advertise the cost of blu ray drives as $300 but that'd be a big ole lie.
Very few people in the U.S. or even in Japan are going to shell out $500 for a console, so they simply WON'T make one that expensive...
They don't need to make a machine that costs that much they could make one half that price and still totally overpower the 360.
As far as selling 500+ machines the truth is the Japanese (who have the money) don't really care about the horsepower that much, and Americans/Europeans couldn't afford it... So why would they do that? It's crazy... way to crazy for us to even be considering possible.
This is old news! Where has everyone been? Slashdot is going downhill....
Perhaps they're spending all this time making sure they get a rootkit on all the games. You never know, somebody might just try to copy one of those things with a PC or something.
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est - Sir Francis Bacon
Whoa whoa whoa, don't get me wrong, you and I agree in several essential respects. The first recipients of the newly printed money do indeed make out like bandits (great work if you can get it). But the money-inflation pressure upward on prices does raise nominal wages. More than the loss in purchasing power? No. My point was just that the nominal, cash-denominated amount is misleading. If Wal-Mart workers pull home $900 a week next year, I absolutely agree it may not even buy what $200 does now.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Philips co-invented the CD with Sony and got royalties from that. They did not get money from DVD, Sony did that without them. My understanding is that Philips (founder or not) didn't co-invent BluRay and gets no fees from it either. Thus, they would pay license fees to produce drives, just like the other founders who don't hold the patents would.
I could be wrong, but that is my understanding.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The whole point of consoles is that they are supposed to be cheaper and easier to design for than computers. 10 years ago there were so many video card manufacturers it was really hard to know if anything was going to be compatible. These days there are really just two video card vendors, and they both cater to DX and OGL. Is it really harder to write games for Windows than for the PS3? If a gamer has to lay out $900 for the next-gen console, is he really saving money over buying a full-fledged PC?
It's crazy, but console makers are rapidly introducing so many features they will soon be full fledged PCs, and cell-phone makers are slowly starting to fill in the niche that consoles are leaving behind.
All this cost and future sales estimates! How is it that geeks become so interested on Sony's production schedule?
Care to talk about Ford's next sedan? They sure need the help.
I predict that by the year 2007, Playstations will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them.
Sony, not having a monoply position in anything won't be able to see this for $199 and just eat the loss.
not that anyone would do that sort of thing
DVDs cost $25. Why? Is it the cost of the media? Nope. It's because they can get $25.
Samsung is charging $1000 for this thing because they'll have the only device out there (well, the only one under $3000). It doesn't mean it costs so much to make that they couldn't sell it for less and make money on it.
Why do you call Cell experimental when it's already shipping from IBM in blade servers? NVidia makes chips with over 100 million transistors and sells them every day. Cell is only strange to you because you make it so. When it comes to manufacturing it, it's not all that different from any other CPU or GPU.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Do you happen to see a cost listed on that rather short list for the shell of the PS3? How about a cost for the interior housing? Screws? Maybe a cost for the included Duo Stick reader? No? How about a cost for the included controller, surely that would be there? Not there either? How about cost for packaging? The included demo disk? Power cord maybe? Manuals? Not there either huh? Hmmm lets think about this then. If we total up the cost of what isn't listed there, we'd get about $100 to perhaps $200 dollars (if you're a bit unrealistic). Whats that mean? Why that means that the estimated price would be 'around $900' or to put it another way, exactly what the article suggested. All you see listed there, is a rather small collection of the most critical and most expensive parts that make up the PS3 as a whole. If you add in everything that makes up a PS3, using they're estimates you'd get $900.
Call their total estimates into question all you want, but when you start off by trying to claim they don't know how to do simple addition, you sound like a moron.
All this speculation that there is trouble manufacturing the Cell processor is because some analyst in Japan thinks that the processors will cost Sony $230 each. That is really weak evidence for assuming that yields suck. I think that the simplest explanation is that the analyst doesn't know what he's talking about. You probably know more about processors than he does.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
It looks like the Revolution is going to be a winner on so many levels. Nintendo is the one to watch.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
i hate sony, but $900 is not going to be the MSRP, if anything it COULD be the manufactering cost
This might cost more and take longer to ship than an Infinium Labs Phantom. Then again Maybe it'll have a sticker on it that says Phantom Inside.
The analyst seems to be forgetting the other products that will carry both the cell chip, and the blue ray drive, as well as all licensing thereof which will help recoup losses on the PS3. The Japanese corporate mindest does not mind an apparant loss of a battle when ultimate victory of the war is in sight, and no doubt Sony sees winning the battle as a possibility.
I would have considered that a better option in the early 1990s, but Linux has had a lot of work put into it and has become a very mature system.
The thing about sony's system's is that most components are either manufactured by sony or a joint venture with a sony partner. For example the last emotion engine and the current cell processor. They spent somewhere around 1 billion to work with toshiba on building the factory that would churn out the emotion engine. So initial costs were extremely high during START-UP.
Afterwards, sony can recoup costs over time and as they've done with the ps2 and psx. Once they have the infastructure and factory's and mass-produce the cell processors and blu-ray drives the costs of these units will seem far from huge.
With electronics you can't just say, oh this ps2 cost $400 to produce on release. Because the equations are far more complicated. Since the cost of running a factory is far less then it cost to create it usually.
Hmmm... Pie...
It came to my attention the other day that a Conan game was being planned for the PS3. I messed around with the bastardization that was released for the PC, a couple years ago. I think what put me off immediately was Basil Poledouris' score. Not that I do not think Basil Poledouris is one of the most sexy men that have ever lived; he is. It's that the game started out like shit, continued to be shit, and to have his score in there was outright insulting...to me, as a consumer. The horrible gameplay and controller mechanics just added to that sense of nausea.
If they got someone like Jeremy Soule, with an original soundtrack, and did a little more work in the animation department rather than the SUPER-MEGA-ROUNDHOUSE-COMBO!! marketing department, the game would totally work for me.
I would give serious consideration to actually buying a Sony product. I know, I know...Allah forbid that I should support Sony's evil empire. But for something close to Halls of Volta, I might supress my morality long enough to take a look at it.
Actually, I would assume that like most other visualization applications, they would have moved away from SGI. But what do I know.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The 2nd column (cost of items in 3 years) adds up perfectly. So your theory is wrong unless you think all that stuff is free 3 years from now. Your moron comment doesn't work.
I think the $80 listed at the bottom is supposed to cover all that stuff. Honestly, it seems like it could be low to me. Not that memory stick Duos cost anything (I can get 1GB for $40 retail right now, the 128MB Sony gives out won't be more than $7 wholesale) but the power supply plus controller could add up to $50 alone. And as you stay, you still have to put it in a case and a box. I'd put the "misc" charges at about $100. And that's before the cost of getting it into the distribution channel.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
$900!
thats like the most expensive rootkit ever!
Guess I'll play PC games then. No way in hell I'm going to shell out more than $300 on a fucking video game system. I think I fit in with 'common person' here. Sure, there's a bunch of gamer freaks that will. But it's not that much of a draw for most people. I see posts where people seem to think that $500 is acceptable. What planet are you from? Or better, how many of those $500 people still live with their parents? People with real lifes and real bills are like what the fuck ever. I'll throw $300 max at a video card for my PC and go that way. Hell, especially when compared with relatively good systems from Dell for $299. Sure they're basically what was top of the line 2 years ago, but that's still a lot of power. Just a point of reference. If I was to buold a totally new PC, I'd probably throw at least $800 into it, but for a dumb box that I'm only going to use to play games? Not even. Sure, it might have all the 'media center' crap as well, but just not interested. Slouching on a couch trying surf the net with at most 1080 lines of resolution? Nah, too addicted to dual 1600x1200 displays on my PC.
I dunno, they must be targeting some other group of people, but for me I just shake my head in wonder at them. PS3 is looking like a major flop. Was interested since I'm a PS2 owner, but now looking and hoping for the rumors about the new Nintendo system to come true. We'll see... I probably just got trolled by some dumb marketing guy testing the waters. But my max price point is $300. I think I paid $150 for my Atari 2600 back in the day, and that's about what I paid for my PS2, so more than doubling the cost is where I draw the line. Not saying that there's not people out there that will pay it, but I'm betting that it's no more than 10% of the interested people are going to be interested (let alone have the means) in paying over $300 for a damn video game machine.
Am I the only one who thought Sony lost a bet?
Why not just get them to give all the money they would have lost on the PS3, to Microsoft?
Don't ask me if the analyses that have been suggested are right, but I must say, M-L has been given a gift in the way that the different aspects of the report have been criticized (and corrected?) by slashdot-ers. If I'm trying to predict the future, I might as well see if I can get a report noticed by slashdot. On the other hand, the reports author, Joe Osha, is fairly well respected in his area of financial analysis, semi-conductor companies. But if you look at his old quotes, he's taken it in the shorts a few times, too, as evidenced by saying "It's very hard to find evidence of a real end to the upturn that began in late 1998" in 2000 (when everyone was saying those sorts of things).
The part after "aditionally" is blatantly cut/pasted from the Engadget discussion on the same topic found at http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/18/playstation-3-c osts-900-sez-merrill-lynch-mob/#c1063780. Unless this person happens to be the poster of the comment on Engadget (and he didn't bother to direct people to it), it should be modded down even though he makes a great point.
I wish people would quit citing this horrible unsubstantiate link written by a 'tough guy' game rental store owner
Vermifax
Logout
Yes, the costs for the cables/manuals/a port or two, a demo disk (mass produced disks cost less then pennies to physically produce and not much time/money needed to put a demo disk together to matter when your talking about 1 million+ ps3's in the first few months) == $100.
I'll bet the cost of all of those things together will be less then $25 bucks. Remember, while sony and other game manufacturers charge an arm and a leg for extra controllers/accessories, it's due to their giant margin on those products. They make a ton of profit so the cost of a controller @ retail is far lower then it costs to manufacture.
Hmmm... Pie...
I don't know if anybody has pointed this out yet, but Production costs are only part of the equation when it comes to console pricing. Distribution and retail markup, not to mention marketing costs, all have to get factored into the profitability of a console. If the BOM for the PS3 is indeed $900, or even say $600, distribution, retail margin and marketing will add a couple of hundred dollars to the total cost. I don't know if Merrill's estimates are right or wrong. But even if they are off by half, and the console costs $450 to produce, then fully loaded costs are more likely to be $600 per unit. That's a big loss per console at start, and can only be overcome if Sony sells tens of millions of units, so that economies of scale in production, marketing and distribution come into play. Sony is in a tough spot.
I just read what i wrote... i need to be more awake so my posts actually make sense. Reverse the manufacture costs with retail costs!
Hmmm... Pie...
Moved away, to what exactly? Nothing on the market performs in that arena as well as SGI did, then you run into all sorts of applications that only exist under SGI, etc so on and so forth.
How much does the RootKit add to that price?
It's true sony is taking a bigger risk wiht the ps3 then the ps2 (definately not the psone though--that was hella risky territory for sony with a lot of experimental variables).
Sony is a hardware and R&D company, very different from MS. Just like they did with teh ps2 and psx, sony will have spent several billion (not so much for the psx but definately for the ps2) to setup the chip foundries and other factories to gear up for mass manufacture. Sony's highest costs have always been at the startup of a new console. With teh ps2 they broke even with the one millionth or so console and profits were about $175 or so on teh consoles afterwords.
The only companies in history to have suffered massive losses from hardware costs are Sega and Microsoft. Both of these companies don't produce anywhere near as much of their consoles as sony does. They pay vendors for most of their equipment.
In sony's case there is very little that they aren't producing (like the nvidia graphics chip).
In this case the most costly components listed by ML in the article was the cell processor and the blu-ray drive. The cell processor cost in the article was $230 dollars. But the thing is sony isn'tgoing to pay a fixed cost on the thing, ML just came up with that number out of their asses.
Sony helped fund the cost of the fabs that will be used to produce these with IBM justlike they did with the emotion engine and toshiba. They will spend over a billion early on but after they've produced their 1-2 millionth console they've met the initial cost of setting up the fab which is by far the most expensive part in this.
The blu-ray cost is laugable in almost every way. You can buy full fledged dvd-players nowadays for only $30 dollars @ retail. Going through the supply chains all the way to the manufacturer it costs them what, $22 to produce the whole player unit? Out of that, the pure drive components are what $8-16 USD.
Comparing the cost of a blu-ray players/recorders to what will be inside the ps3 is ludicrous. Since blu-ray was developed by sony they won't be paying royalty's to anyone AND they'll produce the drives themselves. Sure it's going to be moret hen the cost of just using dvd-rom drives. But once again sony is the manufacturer and they'll make the facilities themselves to produce 1-2 million of these babies within the first 12 months (probably much more). $350 per unit is ridiculous price.
Hmmm... Pie...
I don't know how much I believe this report, but there are several reasons to believe that Sony is in serious trouble. - Launch date: Late 2006 in Japan? Seems likely. Although I would expect Sony to have better control of manufacturing than Microsoft has, there is no chance for Sony to do a proper world-wide launch of the PS3 before Christmas. So, Microsoft gets TWO holiday seasons without Sony, while there will be a battle between Sony and Nintendo for Christmas sales in Japan this year. - Production cost. How ever way you turn it, Sony is not going to be able to sell this console in the $300-400 range and earn money on it at first. Pricing it above this will scare away most of the customers. The competition will be selling in the $300-400 range and earning money. Even though Sony may earn some money back off games and Blue-Ray movies, selling at a loss is not a winning business strategy. Since the other parts of Sony are doing rather bad at the moment, a failure in SCE will endanger the future of the whole company. The stakes are enormous this time, folks...
- Sony is the winner right now, with both somewhat innovative games (Buzz, Singstar, EyeToy) and the regular fare.
- Nintendo is betting it's future on being innovative (Nintendogs, WarioWare etc.)
- MS is betting solidly on more-of-the-same (more driving games, more shooting games, more sports games)
Remember that when you look at the total sales of games, the hard-core gamers are in the minority. At least where I live, the Buzz quiz-game was the biggest selling game this Christmas. Why? It appeals to people who plays games occationly. It's also a social game.
I'm pretty sure that the Nintendo/Sony way is going to pay off, and I wonder how long it will take before MSFT wakes up.
And I didn't direct people to engadget because it's not courteous to slashdot to say "the discussion is better elsewhere" and send people away...
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If I remember correctly, $494 was how much it cost Sony to produce the Playstation 2. This means that it should be no problem for Sony to sell the Playstation 3 at a reasonable price to consumers.
Besides, Sony has learned from the PSX that selling a game console with a lot of features for a consumer-unfriendly price will only hurt them in the long run.
I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
Speaking purely from public knowledge...
They are actually only using 7 of the 8 SPEs per chip to add greater fault tolerance.
I'm guessing that the yields work out dramatically better this way than with simply 6 SPEs per chip. If you think about it - say half the silicon is used by the main processor and parts other than the SPEs and then the other half is used to make up the 8 SPEs... 6SPEs means you drop total die size by 12.5%. Assuming an average chip has one flaw, some have none, some have two - the chips with two flaws almost certainly still have issues and the ones with one flaw only change by a few percent. On the other hand, build in the ability to accept a flaw on half the silicon, you're looking at dropping your failure rate by nigh on 50%.
So, in short, the very parallel design of the CELL opens up opportunities that the much less parallel design of say a Pentium can't use. With a Pentium, if there's a flaw anywhere, you ditch the whole chip. With a cell, if there's a single flaw, so long as it's in the SPE area, oh well. It's only when a second one turns up that it's an issue.
Even better would be if they could switch those blocks of local memory around. That way you could have SPE 4 and memory 6 both have errors and still get a perfectly servicable chip by routing SPE 6 to use memory 4.
Nice little trick for totally rewriting the rules on yield issues.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Sony products are famous for breaking when you drop them.
This is not a signature.
So during the debut of the thing, it's entirely possible that him buying the machine could hurt them worse than not buying it (since he has no control to keep everyone from buying his unit).
All you will do is create artificial scarcity by buying just after debut, hence increasing the value of the thing. That hardcore gamer you're talking about? You can't tell me with a straight face that such a one is not going to buy when availability improves, and I assure you availability will improve despite your buyer negligibly (if at all) diminishing the sales of PS3 games.
blog
It's the name of the factory because it's the name of the town the factory is in. There are lots of -kill placenames in the northeast US. "Kill" is Dutch for creek or stream, and "fish" in this case is a shortening of "fisherman."
Sony is currently fighting the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle. For their horse to win they need to get more Blu-Ray drives out there than HD-DVD ones.
Now with the first gen models of each format coming out, it would seem that HD-DVD drives cost an awful lot less than Blu-Ray - and the more units shipped the cheaper they can be made for. Sony needs to get more people making them and selling them NOW. They need to get other manufacturers to commit to making and shipping huuge numbers NOW.
But there's a bit of a problem here. Sony keeps on saying they're about to launch and sell a lower cost - subsidized Blu-Ray machine that will compete with what they want the other manufacturers to make. In the minds of people - Blu-Ray=PS3.
Why on earth would you buy a Blu-Ray player when there's not really any media for it and you know the PS3 is coming out soon and you know the PS3 will be much cheaper (and a PS3 as well).
Now with that in mind, why on earth would you manufacture a Blu-Ray player?
And if nobody buys a Blu-Ray player - apart from on a PS3 then the format will never take off and it's going to be a disaster for Sony - especially as they're going to have to pay to put a Blu-Ray drive in every PS3 ever made.
So whilst Sony is suffering from delays on the PS3 - surely the sensible thing is to play up how much it'll cost with the hope this will get the standalone blu-ray ball rolling.
"Postponed"... "will cost upwards of $900". I don't know if its true but it definitely sounds like news that MS would appreciate, or plant..
That headline is what you're meant to remember.
If it comes out anywhere near $900, I declare Xbox 360 the winner and declare Sony a fool. ...wait, didn't they release a rootkit? I guess my second declaration would be moot.
After the first million console sony broke even on the cost of building new fabs with toshiba and their new factories. After that the console sales themselves has not been at a loss but rather at a slight profit.
Hmmm... Pie...
The PS3 is going to have a blu-ray drive and the rumored pricing/release dates that I have been hearing for a while have been somewhat confusing in that Blu-Ray players that are going to be released this year are expected to cost $1000. How can Sony sell a PS3 for $400 or so when everyone else is getting $1000. By waiting a year I can much more easily see them selling the PS3 for $300-$400 as the Blu-Ray drive prices come down.
I decided to RTFPDF, and the Estimated Cost at Launch listed a bunch of prices for the parts, which added up to $800. At the bottom, their sum was listed as $900, a price which is listed multiple times throughout the PDF. When it comes to adding, they fail it!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
I know it's the name of the town. It just seems a little ironic. Imagine a higher profile facility name Fishkill. Like a nuclear reactor.
Note that a radiology workstation currently is usually a PC, often running Linux with some badly designed software on it that usually costs upwards of $100,000. LOTS of margin.
That custom software probably costs a lot of money to develop, especially if it was badly designed, and the this development cost isn't spread out over a lot of units.
I remember reading somewhere that console sales tend to take a hit in order to sell games -- sorta like cell phones. "Yeah, here, have a (?:cell phone|game console)! ...Congratulations! Now buy 800 games (or whatever) for it."
:-D
Nothing I'm objected to (if it's true; if not, please correct me). Just saying.
Let's take inventory. I own a PS2, which, if memory serves (which it usually doesn't), cost me around $200-$250 when I first got it. Right now, I own GTA:SA, GTA:VC, GTAIII, SOCOM1, SOCOM2, SOCOM3, Hitman: Contracts, Operation Desert Storm, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a few Atari and Midway collections[0][1], and a few others I probably didn't even know I had.
[0] o/~ One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't beeeeeelonnnnnng. o/~
[1] Somewhere, right now, Jack Thompson had a cold chill run down his spine.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Two grad students in my lab duplicated (and greatly improved) the most important functions in about a year. I guess that development cost about $40,000. I expect GE is quite a bit less efficient, but still, I suspect margins on that stuff is reasonably high.
I bet right about now MS is wishing they had waited a little longer to launch 360 so they could include an HD-DVD drive in it instead of just a DVD one...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
PS3 = NeXT. Technology ahead of its time and a market not ready to bite. How much will a 360 cost by the time the PS3 comes out? If you are looking for a new system for yourself or your kids and the choice is a $900 machine with cutting edge technology that most of the market is not quite ready for or a $400 machine with an extensive library of games and a more market proven online experience, what will you do?
As one of the posters above pointed out, one of the key valuations in the analysis is a $350 Blue-Ray premium. A technology that Sony owns. $350 is a large portion of the estimated cost to Sony and there is no justification in the analysis. Similarly for the $230 cost on the Cell processor.
If you read the introduction, the entire analysis was motivated by commentary from one of Merrill Lynch's Japanese analysts. In other words, an industry knowledgeable person proposed a "What if?" scenario and ostensibly provided some corroborating analysis which is also not provided.
Sony is not stupid. They're not likely to sell a console at a $400 (~50%) loss, but they very well might sell it at a $150 or $200 loss, which might happen if the cost of the Cell and Blue-Ray components is $200 below the hand waving analysis in that report. There's deplorably little information about why a 6 month delay is a possibility and there's no line item breakdown of the $350 Blue-Ray cost. It's just a single aggregated line item with no supporting evidence other than "we think" in their material analysis.
Smoke and mirrors.
$45 with the proposed 'fat tax' that some want to put on fast food.
e dicare_and_Soc_Sec_The_fat-tax_and_sweet-tax_solut ion.shtml
http://www.foodconsumer.org/777/8/How_to_Rescue_M
If they're roughly correct with the numbers they do show, US$900 total cost would be conservative.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
OK, so they're asserting that the rumours are baseless and they'll get lots of PS3s out this year. No suprises there, of course they'd say that. But this bit:
Sony does not regard Xbox as a competitor. Rather, the company may even consider working with Microsoft to develop games together, Yasuda noted.
Are they really that confident that they don't even consider Xbox to be a competitor? Well, good luck with that.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
There's no way that the PS3 could possibly be priced at or over $800. My current thoughts put the PS3 at $500 or possibly $400 and $600 (with Blue ray option). People think that getting to the market a year later than the 360 was a huge mistake, I think its fine. XBOX hasnt released a single game that is actually next gen yet.
"Say you love us like i know you will and that our deaths won't be in vain or in the name of gasoline"
If PS4 doesn't come before 2017, you can bet that Xbox720 has been out for years. Xbox1440 will probably come out at the same time as PS4 :-)
:(
Microsoft can easily make two consoles in 10 years. PS3 will probably not be as far ahead compared to the current XB360 as the fanboys think. When Microsoft relases their new Xbox in 5 years, it will be another 5 years until Sony releases PS4. Will you keep your (then) outdated PS3? The sad thing, is that you probably will
Didn't 3D0 and, hmmm, what was it?, the NeoGeo(? with $250 game cartridges) try this and flop majorly? (Well they may not have flopped entirely, but there were never very many good games released for them. Ok, the NeoGeo was probably OK if your REALLY REALLY like arcade exact games, and didn't mind $250 a pop...)
$900 for a game machine is way too high($400 or less, preferably $300 would be what it would take), I think, after all I balked at the $300 original pricetag on the PS2, of course the good thing for me, is that most of the launch games for consoles hold zero interest to me(prefer RPGs) so I can usually afford to wait until some RPG that looks really good is going to be release. (Of course the drawback nowadays is that RPGs in NA are released sooner and more often than they were, for say, the PSX... FF7 drove me into a PSX purchase, fortunately by which time the PSX was c. $125 or so, and some other good RPGs also came out around the same time, Persona, Suikoden, the original Legacy of Kain(blood omen? the "sequels" sucked being way too much action game and way too little RPG), etc.)
Really, if the PS3 comes out at $900 in November 2006, I wonder what the XBOX 360 would be down to? And it looks like this time the XBOX will be getting more than "re-targetted" PC games...
Sony has made a stupid descision to go with the Blu Ray technology. Sony, should just throw a cheap DVD player into the machine and call it a day. Besides how much information will developers need to store on a disc anyway. 8+ gigabytes is more than enough space for any game developer to take advantage of, even if the goal is set a new benchmark with a title. It's a serious waste of technology and development dollars on the part of Sony. How long are game developers willing to wait until Sony brings out this slick piece of technology? Blu Ray is a "geek" only device that appeals to the gamers who want a machine that can do everything from online gaming to microwaving hot-pockets. If I were Nintendo at this point I would smell blood from the competition. Nintendo has a good chance of capturing back the game market that they once lost to two competetors who want to develop overly expensive machines that can't be produced within a reasonable amount of time. The point is both Microsoft and now Sony have seriously dropped the ball on developing overly pricy next gen machines that only appeal to the hardcore "geek" gaming crowd.
One thing that people fail to consider is the cost of software licensing. The Blu-Ray specification mandates Java support in the player... because that's the language all the rich/interactive Blu-Ray content will be authored in. So there needs to be a bytecode interpreter in any Blu-Ray player's firmware, along with any libraries necessary.
So, since the PS3 will be fully Blu-Ray compliant, Sony will have to license Java from Sun (or perhaps they'll license IBM's VM instead of Sun's, which could save them some money since Sony is already sourcing the Cell processor from IBM). It's a non-zero cost. And this cost is not part of the cost of the Blu-Ray drive itself; this cost is along the same lines as the cost of licensing an MPEG2/4 codec for playback of the video/audio streams on media. Even if Sony authors their own MPEG codecs for the PS3, they'll still need to pay the appropriate licensing fees to the appropriate rights holders.
"$230 seems high for just the CPU. "
Custom CPU on a pretty limited scale*? no, it doesn't.
"I think also M-L doesn't understand that when you make a custom chip you can put a lot of stuff on it. The link (brains) for the USB, 802.11 and ethernet are probably on the main chip in the unit, bringing the cost of them down to nearly free."
because doing that doesn't cost anything. oh wait, it does cost money. Money for design, increased fab costs. increased risk of errors on the silicon, etc . . .
well, I could pick apart the whole post, but franklyy it isn't worth the time becasue clearly you have no grasp of real costs.
*as compared to the PC.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on