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Sony Considers Outsourcing Cell Production
Gamasutra reports on comments from the Sony home office, where executives are considering plans to outsource production of the expensive/complicated Cell chips that power the PS3. Executive deputy president Yutaka Nakagawa is quoted in a Reuters report, saying that when the PS2 launched there just weren't other companies to turn to. With the chip market better-developed in 2007, there are third parties Sony is now considering to take on the task of advancing/producing the Cell. Outsourcing could also help financially with their beleaguered semiconductor division. The next move for the Cell is to 45 nanometer manufacturing, from the 90/65 the company is currently using. This scale change could not only help with profits, but may eventually make dropping the price on the PlayStation 3 an easier pill to swallow.
Problems to solve, in order of priority for the company:
I'd say that NONE of those matter. There is one, and only one, thing that is making the PS3 sales so low - the games. The only must-have game out right now is Resistance, and not everyone likes FPS games. Once they start getting some more games out, the sales will follow, regardless of price, regardless of online experience (which isn't bad considering it's free), etc.
"The ps3 has a lot more potential than the xbox360."
I am not so sure about that anymore.
The XBox360 is much easier to program than the PS/3. History is filled with lots of systems that in theory where very powerful but where too hard to program. The Intel 860 and the Itanium are two great examples. Some of the massively parallel super computers like the Thinking Machine where also a tough machine to get the most out of.
There is potential and there is potential. If the programmer can't use it then it is useless.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I agree. I own neither a PS3 nor a 360 and have no intentions of getting either, but from what I've seen, I'm guessing the PS3's power will remain an unfulfilled promise. PS3 developers are all going on and on about how they're only using one processor, or only a fraction of the PS3's power, but there's a reson for that: Developing massively multithreaded applications is hard, and sometimes impossible. In theory, the PS3's processor may destroy the 360. In practice, it probably never will.