News PlayStation 3 is in production

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/07...in_production/

[Bindibadgi]

So, have they fixed the hardware issues? We can only assume so.

[TheColdLord]

They must have since they will lose a lot of cash if the product has seriouse flaws. Are the specs on the finished design out yet?

[Bindibadgi]

7 Cell cores at 2.8GHz, 6x1 special. 256meg RDRAM local memory, 256meg GDDR3 (iirc) on RSX, "G71" NV core, Gigabit Ethernet, 54g wifi, card reader, HDCP/HDMI/DD or DTS out (again iirc), blu-ray player, 60gig harddisk.

[DougEdey]

But with only a 10-20% yield on cores that sucessfully meet the minimum of 7 cores requirement...

[TheColdLord]

Holly mother of...aaaa...OMG!!! 7 Cell Cores?! That is of the chart, imagine that on normal pc benchmark....hehe. In a more seriouse note, what will be the price for something like that?

[specofdust]

only 512MB of ram in the entire system, and people are claiming this thing is going to be good? Welcome to another generation of crappy console ports with loading zones a tenth of what they could be due to crappy console ram limitations. Boohiss!

[Morpheon]

Originally Posted by TheColdLord

HollyIn a more seriouse note, what will be the price for something like that?

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by specofdust

only 512MB of ram in the entire system, and people are claiming this thing is going to be good? Welcome to another generation of crappy console ports with loading zones a tenth of what they could be due to crappy console ram limitations. Boohiss!

GC has 48meg of ram and look at resident evil 4. It doesnt need an OS, per say, just the game. That's 256meg of texture memory for 1080p which is pretty decent. You can't compare it to a PC, everything will be optimised not like running windows.

The entire Cell is produced on a 90nm SOI process with 8 layers of copper interconnect. The Cell sports 234 million transistors, and its die size is 221mm2. (This is roughly the size of the Emotion Engine at its introduction.) The PPC core's 32KB L1 cache is connected to the system L2 cache via a bus that can transfer 32 bytes/cycle between the two caches.

221mm2 core size.

300mm wafer = 150mm radius = pi x r x r
= 3.142 x 150mm x 150mm
= 70695mm2

Cores per wafer = 319.88 ~ 300 for those around the edge (circular wafer, square cores)

20% of 300 = 60 Cells

7 per PS3 = 8.57 PS3s per wafer.

Each wafer costs $3000 (typically) = $350 per PS3 JUST IN RAW Cells! No packaging, no other maufacture costs, no RSX, no memory, no blu-ray drive.

So, the PS3 is actually very good value!

[DougEdey]

Remember bindi, that 20% is only if they are lucky, normal yield is around the 14% mark I'd wager.

[Bindibadgi]

Well, give or take. They may get make a breakthrough tomorrow or do post-processing work that fixes some of the connections to bring the yield up, either way $350 is a roundish number and by no means are my "wafer costs" entirely accurate and the 1 special processor is FAB'd on a separate wafer to the other 6 too.

If someone can get some other numbers on the details of GDDR3 (700Mhz iirc) cost, the RDRAM cost from Rambus, the RSX cost from NV (apparently a LOT! compared to what ATI are charging Ninty and MS) and the cost of a blu ray drive and we'd get a proper cost for the whole thing and how much money Sony will hemerage in the 2mil consoles.

[DougEdey]

Just actually looked at your calculations...
The yield % is for chips with 7+ cores (valid for PS3)

221mm2 core size.

300mm wafer = 150mm radius = pi x r x r
= 3.142 x 150mm x 150mm
= 70695mm2

Cores per wafer = 319.88 ~ 300 for those around the edge (circular wafer, square cores)

20% of 300 = 60 Chips/PS3s per wafer



Each wafer costs $3000 (typically) = $50 per PS3 JUST IN RAW Cells!

Thats my adjustments at least,

[Bindibadgi]

Ahhhhh! So it's TOTAL fulfilment of chips for PS3, not raw cell processors.

Makes a bit more sense. $50 aint THAT bad for 7 CPUs.

[Firehed]

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

Ahhhhh! So it's TOTAL fulfilment of chips for PS3, not raw cell processors.

Makes a bit more sense. $50 aint THAT bad for 7 CPUs.

I was thinking that seemed insane. You couldn't possibly put 1500mm^2 worth of silicon in a machine of that size, it'd be an oven.

Plus processed wafers only cost about $1500 total. $500 for the untouched thing, then another grand-ish for materials and processing, and presumably the several millon dollars per processing chamber is figured in there somewhere (my dad was in the industry for about 15 years). Well, that was last I heard anyways. I think inflation can be countered with cost saving through outsourcing.

AFAIK, most of the cost of the PS3 is the blu-ray drive. Which means Sony will be making huge profit when the drives only cost ten bucks to make, like DVD burners do today.

[TheColdLord]

Indeed the blu-ray drive will cost a sh**load of money, wich will spice the price.

[Vergil_117]

Didn't John Carmack say that the 7 cores will make it a bit harder to program for?

[CAL3H]

Hmm in the mean time, we can all buy REAL George Foreman grills from argos in their summer sale

(I'm just jealous I wont be able to afford one at launch)!

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by Vergil_117

Didn't John Carmack say that the 7 cores will make it a bit harder to program for?

Yep, it's got to be coded for 6 + 1 cores cause #7 is different again. Plus the Sony dev tools are generally regarded as the worst in the industry.

[EQC]

A few folks up there seemed to think there were 7 Cell's in each PS3...

I know that's incorrect...but correct my rememberances below if I'm wrong:

a) Each Cell processor contains 1 "real" core and 8 "SPE" cores that are good for vector math and floating point and such.

b) To increase yields by allowing for a few manufacturing problems, PS3 will automatically assume 1 SPE is non-functional -- so we're down to the 1 "real" core plus 7 SPE's.

c) One of the PS3's 7 SPE's is reserved for background/OS type stuff (so for gaming programming, there is one real core plus 6 SPE's).

I'd imagine that the "difficulty" in the programming (aside from the rumors of lousy dev. kits sony provides -- which, even at "worst in the industry" are still essentially 3rd best, which may or may not be saying much) would be more in getting all the parallelization stuff to work out in the best way possible. I can't imagine there's much problem dealing with the "real" processor vs. the "SPE's" other than "if this code does AI, or x, y, z, programmers should be sure to send it to the processor...if this code moves objects, deals with vectors, or a, b, c, then programmers should send it to the SPE's". I don't think the problem in development would come from having 2 different types of processing units in the Cell so much as from having to deal with the parallelization to all 6 accessible SPE's to get the optimal performance.

If I remember correctly, Ageia has provided an SDK not just for their PhysX processor, but also for the Cell processor. I'd imagine, then, that Ageia may have taken care of much of the parallelization to the SPE's for PS3 developers, at least in terms of physics, provided they use Ageia's SDK.

[EQC]

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

So, have they fixed the hardware issues? We can only assume so.

Originally Posted by TheColdLord

They must have since they will lose a lot of cash if the product has seriouse flaws. Are the specs on the finished design out yet?

If XBox360's hardware issues at launch (overheating, that "problem" with damaged disks if you move the console while it's on, etc) are any indication, manufacters don't lose too much by selling a flawed product -- they're perfectly willing to do it (Microsoft MUST have known how hot their console got if they did any testing at all), and customers still buy their machines. All the money in consoles is supposedly in games licensing anyway...