Sony to sell PS3 chip lines to rival Toshiba!

[galz]

TOKYO (AFP) - Sony Corp said Thursday that it had agreed to sell its production facilities for the powerful computer chip at the heart of its struggling PlayStation 3 game console to rival Toshiba Corp.
"The problem for the PlayStation 3 is that the production cost is too high," said Tatsuya Mizuno, an analyst at Fitch Ratings.
"It is difficult to maintain a high price because of the competition. That means it is difficult for them to get an adequate return on their investment."
Sony will also sell Toshiba its operations for the RSX graphic processor used in the PS3.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...i3WqQVcOOCUaWw

[bhampton]

Hi,

I read about this on a few other sites and thought I would suggest what I think is behind this...

Toshiba needs an exit strategy from the failing HD DUD format and this move works for both companies. Sony has built up Blu Ray and can move forward with that and now Toshiba can abandon HD DUD and still benifit from Blu Ray's success because the Cell processor powers the biggest selling Blu Ray player to date, the Ps3.

I imagine lots of promotions to try to pass off the inventory of HD DUD hardware and software into the hands of the public will have the DUD-ers jumping for joy without then even realizing a major effort has begun to try to not be left holding the bag.

Anyway,.. my thoughts on the subject,.. what's yours.

-Brian

[TauRus]

Brian, I believe this was a rumour that was officially dismissed by Sony. Or perhaps they indeed had talked about it with Toshiba but never came to agreement. Anyways, its old news.

[SS316SRV]

Hasn't there been a lot of other threads about this?

Good idea though, Toshiba starting to dabble in blu-ray, allowing them to abandon HD DVD. Toshiba won't ever abandon HD DVD though. It is their baby, they put $1,000,000,000,000,000 (or something close to that) on the format. They are not giving up their baby.

[Zazou]

Not old news anymore. It's now official :

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071017/japan_sony_toshiba.html

Lee

[ps3andlovinit]

Originally Posted by bhampton

Hi,

I read about this on a few other sites and thought I would suggest what I think is behind this...

Toshiba needs an exit strategy from the failing HD DUD format and this move works for both companies. Sony has built up Blu Ray and can move forward with that and now Toshiba can abandon HD DUD and still benifit from Blu Ray's success because the Cell processor powers the biggest selling Blu Ray player to date, the Ps3.

I imagine lots of promotions to try to pass off the inventory of HD DUD hardware and software into the hands of the public will have the DUD-ers jumping for joy without then even realizing a major effort has begun to try to not be left holding the bag.

Anyway,.. my thoughts on the subject,.. what's yours.

-Brian

It looks like the same kind of deal they have with Samsung around LCD panels. Samsung invests in the mfg facilities and they both own the joint venture.

[bhampton]

Hey,

Don't you think that when they make the best selling Blu Ray player ever they would consider dumping the failing HD DUD format?

If I was building the best selling Blu Ray player ever and also had a bunch of resources tied into a clearly failing format,.. I know what I would do but that's just me.

-Brian

[PaulGo]

Thursday, October 18, 2007
Sony, Toshiba Work Together on New 45nm Chips For PS3

Sony and Toshiba announced today the establisment of a new company that will take over the development of the new "Cell" and "RSX" chips for the Playstation 3.

Sony announced that it plans to sell to Toshiba its "Cell" microprocessor output facility in Nagasaki prefecture and "RSX" graphic chip production line in Oita prefecture, both in western Japan, by March 2008.

The 300mm wafer line currently produces the Cell using a 65-nanometer process technology but under Toshiba's ownership will be transitioned to the advanced 45-nm process. Towards this effort, IBM and Sony have signed an agreement to extend their existing manufacturing relationship to 45-nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) for high volume production of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor.

"This collaboration will allow Toshiba to expand and enhance its system LSI business by increasing order volume and securing regular orders of high-performance semiconductors for PlayStation, while Sony Group will aim for the further growth of the PlayStation business by achieving process migration of high-performance semiconductors," the companies said in a joint statement.

The announcement confirms the recent reports about a possible JV between the two companies. Toshiba said that it will hold the 60% of the new company, while Sony wil have the 20% and SCEI the remaining 20%. The name of the new company has not yet been decided. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

Sony, which is in the final year of its three-year turnaround plan under Chief Executive Howard Stringer, said in February it will cut back on future chip spending and may not produce next-generation microchips using 45-nanometre circuitry in-house.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News...x?NewsId=21654

[Xerious]

i hope everyone realizes that the CELL B/E is/was a joint venture between SONY/TOSHIBA/IBM... this in no way manner or form going to effect the format war between BD and HDDUD.

everyone needs to remember that all companies vendor out things to competitors at some point... i work for sprint... we have customers like at&t and verzion on our books... we also use a lot of their pipes as well... it's just sound business practice to do so. companies are multifaceted.

[BluStar88]

Originally Posted by Xerious

i hope everyone realizes that the CELL B/E is/was a joint venture between SONY/TOSHIBA/IBM... this in no way manner or form going to effect the format war between BD and HDDUD.

everyone needs to remember that all companies vendor out things to competitors at some point... i work for sprint... we have customers like at&t and verzion on our books... we also use a lot of their pipes as well... it's just sound business practice to do so. companies are multifaceted.

You are right this is simply a way for sony to;
-improve its share price
-focus on core compenencies
-and get out of a struggling partnership while retaining supply rights

ultimately this sale could result in lower prices for the cell chips as toshiba will have better scale reducing costs and ultimately reducing the market price for the cell chip.

Its all business 101 and nothing to do with the format war.

[ryoohki]

Toshiba Co Produced the CELL with IBM and Sony

[PaulGo]

Some interesting fact on the cell processor:

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
By Bryan Gardiner Email 10.17.07 | 12:00 AM

Gaurav Khanna’s eight PlayStation 3s aren’t running Heavenly Sword -- they’re using Linux plus custom code to solve complex computations.

...Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."

He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.

"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's Folding@home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.

This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."

However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s.

"Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna says of his optimized code.

Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."

"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."

The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna's sees his work as complementary to such endeavors.

Khanna expects to publish the results of his research in the next few months. So while PS3 owners continue to wait for a fuller range of PS3 titles and low prices, at least they'll have some reading material to pass the time.

http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/i..._supercomputer

[Bullseye]

Is this any indication that Sony and Toshiba are going to resolve the format war?

[spam.curitiba]

Toshiba helped develope the cell processor with sony and ibm...

[Toony]

Originally Posted by Bullseye

Is this any indication that Sony and Toshiba are going to resolve the format war?

Unrelated to be honest, Sony and Toshiba's relationship in this area go back well before the format war and will probably continue on long after it.

[radagast]

Originally Posted by PaulGo

Some interesting fact on the cell processor:

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
By Bryan Gardiner Email 10.17.07 | 12:00 AM

Gaurav Khanna’s eight PlayStation 3s aren’t running Heavenly Sword -- they’re using Linux plus custom code to solve complex computations.

...Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."

He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.

"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's Folding@home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.

This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."

However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s.

"Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna says of his optimized code.

Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."

"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."

The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna's sees his work as complementary to such endeavors.

Khanna expects to publish the results of his research in the next few months. So while PS3 owners continue to wait for a fuller range of PS3 titles and low prices, at least they'll have some reading material to pass the time.

http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/i..._supercomputer

Neat story. And more so considering that one of the cores on the Cell was deactiviated for the PS3.

[Paradiso]

So what you folks are pretty much saying is, "Don't Panic". I had a gut reaction, but reading all the stuff posted here makes me feel better. Again, nice round of applause for the level heads here, making reactionaries like me not go into coniptions.

[TauRus]

Originally Posted by Paradiso

So what you folks are pretty much saying is, "Don't Panic". I had a gut reaction, but reading all the stuff posted here makes me feel better. Again, nice round of applause for the level heads here, making reactionaries like me not go into coniptions.

I am not sure why would anyone be even nervous about that development. It's not like Sony announced they were exiting game console business or were canceling the Playstation line of products. These huge corporations have very complex relationships - competing on some levels, partnering on others.
If anything, Toshiba will stay more engaged with this technology, possibly will use this new impulse in partnership with Sony to gracefully exit the dying format and save the face along the way. This is very important for a Japanese company.

[richard lichtenfelt]

The above is true with movie studios as well; Johnny Depp's next movie, "Sweeney Todd," is credited as being done by Dreamworks and Warner Bros.

[nails]

I look at this as a wise decision from Toshiba, Reguardless which way the format war goes, they win. Also since Toshiba and Sony are both Japanese companies, I wouldn't doubt if a deal was made between the two to agree on a single format for profit's sake. Toshiba is smart, and there will come a point where they know they arn't going to win. Especially after seeing sales figures in their home country alone. Decisions begin, and long term alliances are formed. Sony joined the Toshiba camp quickly for DVD.. Sony and Panasonic had developed a different format call Video Compact Disc or something like that, but realized that Toshiba's DVD format was better and jumped on that band wagon almost instantly. I wouldn't doubt if Toshiba did the same thing eventually. The question is when, and when they do their other investors like Microsoft, Universal and Paramount probably won't be very pleased. We will see All it takes is the Sony CEO's daughter marrying Toshiba's son in Japan, and all will be good.