IBM Engineer Says PS3 Yields Not So Good

At what point in beating a puppy clean to death with a sack full of its own hardened excrement does an inhuman like me begin to feel this emotion you call ' pity' ? I don' t know — that day may never come. But even I, monstrous and morally deformed as I may be, am beginning to feel sorry for Sony. Because now IBM' s just flat-out saying that the Cell processor is way too expensive and complicated to make.

Tom Reeves, VP of semiconductor technology services at IBM, sez:

" With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you' re lucky to get 10 or 20 percent."

Our buddies over at Gizmodo inform us that this means that the PS3 will be available in very limited qualities (we already knew that) and that " Sony' s going to be bleeding money on these chips." Florian Eckhardt

This is something that Quez and i picked up on in Jan/Feb and it' s been a constant problem for IBM. Looks like they have decided to come clean and attemting to prepare people for really limited PS3 quantities at launch.

I said there would only be " seed quantities" and it' s definately looking that way.

Sony now need to stop with the " we' ll have 1 million for each territory and 1 million per month after launch" , it' s just not viable!

We should make an " If I were Sony thread"

If I were Sony, I' d pay IBM to STFU!!!

You bitches are detrimental to our lies and deceit!

There are two rules to success:

1. Never tell all you know.

We should make an " If I were Sony thread"

If I were Sony, I' d pay IBM to STFU!!!

You bitches are detrimental to our lies and deceit!

Now thats funny

Sony now need to stop with the " we' ll have 1 million for each territory and 1 million per month after launch" , it' s just not viable!

Like you said, it' s from Jan/Feb...

Still That' s Sony, so anything is possible as long as it sux

Can you imagine any other industry that would be satisfied with a 10-20% yeald?
Any other buisness would cease to be.

Ok, this is all as of 1 week ago. IBM are saying that with CELL they' re still hitting a 10-20 percent yield...

Electronic News: What’s the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?

Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you’re lucky to get 10 or 20 percent. If you put logic redundancy on it, you can double that. It’s a great strategy, and I’m not sure anyone other than IBM is doing that with logic. Everybody does it with DRAM. There are always extra bits in there for memory. People have not yet moved to logic block redundancy, though.

Electronic News: Do any of those cores ever go bad, so that you start out with seven and you wind up with six or five?

Reeves: There’s a reliability failure rate for all chip types. By definition, reliability failure is one point circuit that has failed. If it happens to be in an SPE, it will knock out one of the cores. We have electronic fuses now, rather than laser fuses, which you can only blow when you’re doing wafer tests. Electronic fuses you blow electrically. If you really want to be focused on reliability and up-time availability, you can design one of these chips to self-detect. You can ship it with eight cores working, blow one of them, and from a user perspective you would have self-healed it in the field.

Electronic News: But would it be as fast as the chip with eight cores?

Reeves: Yes, because the Playstation 3 only uses seven of them. You’d have a spare. That isn’t implemented in Cell, but it could be. We implemented that same strategy for IBM systems. If you take a logic hit on a chip, you don’t have any impact on performance because there is enough redundancy built in.

Electronic News: What happens if one of the cores blows on the Sony Playstation 3 if there are only seven to start with?

Reeves: It’s just like a reliability failure on your TV or DVD recorder. If it’s within warranty, you send it back. If it’s not, your game doesn’t work anymore. You’ll always have choices about how reliable you want to make a chip with burn-in. Most chips that go into the consumer marketplace on things such as camcorders or DVD players aren’t burned in. But you can add burn-in and improve reliability 5x to 10x. It’s extra cost. Certainly, a company like Sony adds that in.

...but since they' re using " logic redundancy" the figure jumps to somewhere between 20-40 percent.

That' s still dangerously low and they haven' t been able to improve it since the beginning of the year and they' re supposedly starting mass manufacture soon.

I can see tears on the horizon!

This doesn' t mean much, I know. (I don' t usually trust people with " game store" references)
But I' ve been to three different stores in the past week or so (Two gamestops and an EB) and I specifically asked how many units were being allocated to each.

They all said they had no clue, but, they all said that there would be on estimate, 1 million consoles worldwide on launch night.
I wouldn' t have even give any thought to it if it hadn' t been for the fact that all of them said the same rough sentence, and they all gave the the 1 mil worldwide figure, unprompted.

Take it with a grain of salt, but even still, that' s a pretty specific coincidence don' t you think? I' ll call a few different locations tomorrow, and ask the same.

First Sony said 1 million per territory (3 million total), then 2 milion worldwide, now it could be just 1 million...

1 million is a viable number. The US and Japan woud get the bulk though and Europe would either have to wait until 2007 or get " seed quantities" of a few thousand (maybe 50 [thousand] or so per country).

Lauches hardy ever go right though and Sony fucked up big style with the PS2. All a bad launch will mean is that Microsoft and Nintendo sell more during the holiday period. When Sony get some great games (DMC4 for example) the machine will fly off the shelves.

two of the clerks also said that because of the small quantity of consoles, that they' d limit pre-orders to one week in October, and that if you pre-ordered a ps3 game, you' d be called when you could pre order the ps3. I think I' ll spend the five dollars down to get alerted for the pre-order date, not claim my game, and wait for the game library to grow a bit.

I saw this coming miles away, the article is probably exadurating a little but I never believed Sony would be able to produce as many PS3s as they initially stated.

I always believed that BR was a risk for cost conserns but I knew that CELL was a bad idea all around. I still laugh when I think back to when the ps3 specs were announced and going on the Playstation forums and seeing everyone giddy about ps3 being twice as powerful as 360. LMAO, idiots.

Sony seems to be bothered with many things, if they DIE - it' s this Gen or never

Buyt if they do DIE, Wii is going to inherit most japanese PS franchises.360 won' t be much better than it is - at least that the way I see it.

ORIGINAL: ]GaNgStA[

Sony seems to be bothered with many things, if they DIE - it' s this Gen or never

Buyt if they do DIE, Wii is going to inherit most japanese PS franchises.360 won' t be much better than it is - at least that the way I see it.

I' m in a fix.... I really need to know Saturday' s lottery numbers... can you
predict those too????

There are two rules to success:

1. Never tell all you know.

Sure 3 22 45 26 37 12

Would you like to know the IGN score for Halo 3?

ORIGINAL: ]GaNgStA[

Sure 3 22 45 26 37 12

Would you like to know the IGN score for Halo 3?

That would be great!!!! Not only am I gonna net myself a fortune, but I am gonna
know the verdict on one of the most anticipated games EVER!! Before Bungie
even play it...

Take that Bungie-jumping b@st@rd@rses!!!

*Jumps around happily*

There are two rules to success:

1. Never tell all you know.

I am gonna
know the verdict on one of the most anticipated games EVER!! Before Bungie
even play it...

You think Bungie would want to play the new Zelda? hmm...