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Playstation 3 Soon Into Production
Roy van Rijn writes "According to Forbes, the Commercial Times reported that Taiwanese ASUSTeK Computer Inc. will be delivering PlayStation 3 consoles to Sony starting this month. The news comes amid concerns that Sony may not have enough Cell and RSX chips to meet production goals of 2 million units for launch. The report also states that, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, also a Taiwanese company, will soon begin making the PlayStation 3 consoles for Sony too. Total monthly shipments from manufacturers are expected to be 200,000 units per month."
"The first consignment is for 4 mln units, the report said, noting that monthly shipments will start at 200,000 units, rising to 2 mln in October."
Does this mean they're going to ramp up from 200k per month to 2m per month in the space of about two months? That sounds just a bit unbelievable to me.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Four or five years ago I had the chance to visit one of the first few semiconductor foundries producing 12-inch wafers.
It was explained to me how yields are always pretty bad during the ramping up phase but once things get going the number of defects decrease dramatically. I don't recall the specific details or how long this phase lasts, but I'm not surprised that there would be problems leading up to actual production. That's kind of the point of this process, to identify as many problems as possible beforehand.
They may have problems early into the production run, but given the complexity of the PS3 I expect Sony will have numerous other issues to contend with beyond defective chips. I expect problems as bad, if not worse than the Xbox360's overheating power supply.
Yeah they had the same goals for the PS2 at it's launch... and then the Emotion engine had yield problems. On top of the question of yields I wonder if the market is really as excited about this console as people are assuming it is.
Sure there are die-hard, rabid, Playstation fanatics who would still buy one if the price was your first born. But if you look at the fact that Sony has always had lame launch titles, the PSP's consumer excitement around it's launch could be described as "apathetic" with the die hard fans camping out for a product that didn't even sell out.... Root kit lost a lot of fans... as did Sony's double talk arrogance and bad mouthing of their competition, and lets not forget the clear rip-offs of Nintendo's Wii-mote and Microsoft's Guide button, and perhaps most importantly THE PRICE. Heck the reason for the high price was because of the Blu-Ray drive, and reviews thus far have shown that HD-DVD is stomping all over Blu-Ray. HD-DVD has 2 layer discs (15gig per layer/30gig total) and uses the awesome VC-1 codec. Blu-Ray can't get good yields on dual layer discs and even single layer discs have yield problems forcing them to only be able to use 80% of it... ~20gig. Not to mention they're using the woefully outdated MPEG2 codec and most reviews have said that some of the movies DVD counterparts look better then the Blu-Ray versions.. Even early Blu-Ray players can only read single layer discs, so will the PS3 be stuck to only reading single layer discs as well? NOT GOOD FOR PS3 SALES particularly if Sony was banking on people buying it as a cheap Blu-Ray player. nobody wants another UMD movie format.
I think low yield might be the least of their problems. Every day I see more and more of the die-hard Playstation fans going from "of course I'm getting one" too "I'll wait and see" or in some cases "I decided to get an 360/Wii instead".
Heck you can tell how much the fan base has soured from the dramatically decreasing number of ignorant and belligerent fanboy comments to PS3 news.
Collector's Edition
If the general interest everywhere else is like it is here, 2 million should be more than enough to cover launch. Its a bit jacked up how the "bad buzz" has spread well beyond the internet, especially since its somethig none of us have seen yet. My brother in law was asking me about the xbox 360 yesterday, and was telling me how he heard the ps3 was an overpriced piece of ****. He has no home computer nor email account so how he heard this I have no idea, but if its any indication of the "general public" that is always discussed here as not knowing anything its not a good sign.
That is what they are refering to. But even allowing for the redundant SPE, satisfactory yeilds are only at 10%. So basically Sony is paying for 10 processors for every shipped processor. No doubt this will increase as time passes and they refine the process. IBM's current 3 core PowerPC processors (the 360's processor for all those fanboys watching) is currently yeilding about 60%. The cell is effectivly a single core PowerPC with 8 SPEs strapped on, the issue is with the SPEs, not the core itself. The other problem with this chip design (apart from the obvious coding complexity) is that cores are prone to failure after the testing phase. This could mean something far worse than the disc read error of the PS2 or the 360 heating issues. The games are allowed 5 SPEs and the core, so no doubt most will use these. The remaining 2 assumingly functional SPEs are reserved for the OS and DRM (that's right, blu ray required an entire 3.2 Ghz processor for it's DRM).
The other issue that I am less informed of and have just heard traces of across the net is that there are too few blu diodes for the blu ray drive, any even if enough for the PS3, what about the players that need to be release on that ever further away date. No use releasing a new format with only a game mechine capable of playing the format. Yes the PS3 is cheaper than Sony's blu ray players (or any other from my knowledge) but the average consumer will certainly not see it in this way, it's a branding issue. Many people don't understand gaming and will dismiss it as a toy.
I believe what is being referred to are the extra circuits that are built into DRAM. They have "spares" built into them assuming that a certain percentage are going to be bad, in which case one of the spare circuits is used instead.
I wonder where people get the DS whooping PSP ass thing from. Fanboyism?
Software sales are a lot better for the DS than the PSP and the system clearly trounces the PSP in Japan (other territories don't have as much consistent sales data tracking). Overall they're equal in the US, the DS wins by a few million units in Japan (gap widening) and noone knows what it's like in Europe. The software sales are the strangest bit, the DS is getting overproportionally more software sales than the PSP (or at least it gets titles into the top ten much more frequently).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.