Report: Sony To Consider Outsourcing Cell Production

[Spartan_X]

Report: Sony To Consider Outsourcing Cell Production

A Sony Japan executive has revealed that the company is planning to cut back on future chip spending, and may elect not to continue to produce the Cell processor in-house as production of the PlayStation 3 continues to ramp up.

A Reuters report quoted executive deputy president Yutaka Nakagawa as saying that investment in chips would be significantly reduced from its current total of ?460 billion ($3.98bn) over the next three years. The move is apparently an attempt to encourage an earnings recovery from the group?s semiconductor division.

"When we first offered the PS2, there were no semiconductor companies that were able to make chips for the machine, so we did it ourselves. But now, there are companies that specialize in chip production," Nakagawa said. "They are aggressively investing in cutting-edge technology. Our basic understanding is that we probably won't need to do everything by ourselves for next-generation chips."

The expensive and complex-to-produce Cell chip acts as the central processing unit of the PlayStation 3, and is currently manufactured using 90 and 65 nanometer circuitry. Sony intends to move to cheaper 45 nanometer manufacture by 2009. "We tentatively plan to start commercial production of 45-nanometer chips in late 2008 or early 2009. We are going to study carefully whether we should carry out all the capital investment and produce them in-house," said Nakagawa.

As well as helping Sony?s semiconductor division, the move to 45-nanometer production should make a substantial price cut for the PlayStation 3 easier. Revenues from the company?s chip operations are expected to rise by 57 percent to ?770 billion ($6.35bn) this business year, accounting for 9.4 percent of the company?s overall buSource:ource: Gamasutra

[magik]

Yea, well, deperate times call for desperate measures.

[TokyoKiller]

I wouldn't call it a desparate measure. It was announced that the Cell is to be used not only in the Playstation 3 so faster and cheaper production is needed to deploy larger amounts.

I hope to see the Cell in SonyEricsson phones :D.

[sundayx Veteran]

Isnt cell an joint processor with IBM and Toshiba? If outsource cuts costs, then why not?

[Dazzla Veteran]

Could've seen this coming a mile off. Although they built the fabs and co-developed it, it just makes sense to spread production (for capacity reasons as well as cost reason).

[Spartan_X]

I hope to see the Cell in SonyEricsson phones :D.

in that case you're going to need one these to power up that thing... :laugh: :rofl: :p

[The Teej]

A Cell Processor in mobile phones would be awesome :D

[George P Global Moderator]

I don't think the point was the outsorcing exactly, the thing was cutting future chip spending, so Sony is going to toss less money into the Cell then they originally intended. Sony and Toshiba are the only ones that can push the Cell inthe CE market, into players/tvs etc. IBM at best can push it into enterprise servers etc.

But I think it's another chip arch that's fated to go the way of the Alpha/PA-RISC and others, x86 isn't going to die anytime soon, and Intel has a working 80 core test chip right now. Though it doesn't do much at this point, both Intel and AMD aren't going to sit and let Sony have its way.

[magik]

The Cell processor was meant to be a multi-purpose processor, useful in many different devices that need such computational power. It was never meant to be used strictly for the PS3.

Intel's 80 core (it's actually 82 IINM) is purely for research purposes. We may eventually get there, but as of right now, there is no real need for that many cores. Quad-core is becoming more and more available and it will go from there. The point is to reduce power consumption. As processors get rated at higher clock-speeds the power consumption increases exponentially. In order to alleviate this and still get more computational power, the industry is moving towards parallel processing and multiple cores is the answer. To not go too far off a tangent, this can be related to gaming today as is made evident by the Xbox 360's triple-core processor.

[Cole]

I don't think the point was the outsorcing exactly, the thing was cutting future chip spending, so Sony is going to toss less money into the Cell then they originally intended. Sony and Toshiba are the only ones that can push the Cell inthe CE market, into players/tvs etc. IBM at best can push it into enterprise servers etc.

But I think it's another chip arch that's fated to go the way of the Alpha/PA-RISC and others, x86 isn't going to die anytime soon, and Intel has a working 80 core test chip right now. Though it doesn't do much at this point, both Intel and AMD aren't going to sit and let Sony have its way.

Tell me, what would we need an 80 core processor for?

We need to be exploring a faster way to transmit data physically at this point. Like a quantum computer or a computer that uses light to communicate. I honestly don't think anyone or anything, for that matter, would need 80 cores for anything.

[TDQuiksilver]

Many companies do this anymore.. not too surprising. But it's not only for the Playstation 3. A Cell-powered SE phone would definitely be awesome as mentioned above! :yes:

[gunnerhkjp]

Actually, there is a lot of press about this in the Japanese press.

Initially, the large semiconductor spending was planned by major Japanese manufacturers to form a joint venture fabrication facility.

Unfortunately, these manufacturers are all bitter rivals, and they couldn't arrive on an agreement.

A fall in semiconductor prices didn't help.

The fact of the matter is that Japanese manufacturers prefer to deal with cheap Taiwanese foundaries then with each other.