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Cell Hits 45nm, PS3 Price Drop Likely to Follow
Septimus writes "At this weeks ISSCC, IBM announced that the Cell CPU used in the PlayStation 3 will soon make the transition to IBM's next-gen 45nm high-k process. 'The 45nm Cell will use about 40 percent less power than its 65nm predecessor, and its die area will be reduced by 34 percent. The greatly reduced power budget will cut down on the amount of active cooling required by the console, which in turn will make it cheaper to produce and more reliable (this means fewer warrantied returns). Also affecting Sony's per-unit cost is the reduction in overall die size. A smaller die means a smaller, cheaper package; it also means that yields will be better and that each chip will cost less overall.'"
A price drop would be nice (though the PS3 is now competitive), but the more interesting bit is when is the PS3 slim going to appear. All the pieces are in place for a slim. Sony have been aggressively shrinking the motherboard in the PS3, and the chip size has dropped from 90nm, to 65nm and now 45nm. All that means less power (smaller PSU) and less heat (less fans & heatsinks). There have been other announcements such as thinner blu ray reader headers. It can only be a matter of time before a slim and I think it will hit before the holidays this year. I think it will sell by the shitload too when it does appear. The question is will we see a slim 360 to compete with it? I think there must be a lot of empty space in the 360 too.
Is the fact they've dropped hardware PS2 emulation.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You would be correct if Xbox 360 nor Wii didn't exist. Prices will certainly drop or the units will be packed with more of other kind of technology (PVR) for the same price.
There is a difference between being able to PRODUCE processors and being able to SUPPLY the cell processors. There have been more than a few occasions where Macintosh sales were hurt from CPU shortages.
That was mostly an Apple problem. When you order large numbers of processors, you have to place your order ~6 months in advance. Apple's strategy was generally to place a very conservative initial order then demand more chips immediately.
And not just general code, it falls down on any problem that requires a non-trivial amount of memory to be available to each Cell SPE. It is like each SPE is an Altivec engine running only with cache memory and you must manually manage the cache completely. It is probably cheaper and easier to just stick two quad core intel cpu's into a system, and you'll get a better price/performance ratio especially when you consider the price of development to the arcane architecture.
PLUS the astonishing thing is that you can't buy Cell chips on their own! they don't sell them! they have no datasheets on them. IBM will only sell you large quantitiess of pre-made motherboards that have a cell on them for a huge cost per board, and they'll charge you $1 million dollars to design the board in the first place. The reason is that Sony and IBM co-designed the chip (Toshiba is involved too I think) and they have agreements where IBM won't sell to anyone without Sony approving it in case it may conflict with Sony's business interest.
Yes, at first the Cell looks/looked exciting, but after we went though the whole mess with IBM it just is not worth it or good enough.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn