James Delahunty
13 Feb 2007 15:13
A Sony Corp. executive has revealed that the company aims to cut back on chip spending in the future and may not produce advanced chips used in the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in-house. The Cell chip that powers PS3 is currently being produced with 90nm and 65nm circuitry and Sony hopes to move the "supercomputer on a chip" to 45nm by 2009.
Narrower circuitry makes the overall size of a chip smaller and helps to cut production costs. Sony Executive Deputy President Yutaka Nakagawa revealed that investment in chips would be reduced significantly from the ¥460 billion (U.S.$3.8 billion) allocated over the three business years since April 2004.
The Cell chip, along with the included Blu-ray disc player, has pushed up the retail price of the PS3 console, giving both Microsoft and Nintendo an advantage in their next-gen gaming hardware offerings.
"We tentatively plan to start commercial production of 45-nanometre 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," Nakagawa said.
He continued: "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."
Source:
Reuters