Sony sells $835m PS3 CPU plant to Toshiba
Consolation prize?
Sony today re-iterated its plan to sell its Cell processor chip factory to Toshiba, which will pay ¥90bn ($835m) for the facility.
Toshiba's buying the plant in Western Japan, but it'll be run by a joint-venture co-owned by the two giants. The JV was announced in October 2007, part of Sony's plan to exit the costly chip business.
The JV is due to be incorporated on 1 April, on which date it will use the plant acquired by Toshiba to punch out Cell CPUs and the RSX graphics chips - the GPU developed by Nvidia and, like Cell, used in the PlayStation 3.
Sony's partnership with Toshiba over the Cell chip is in stark contrast to the two firms' opposition over next-gen optical disc formats. Yesterday, Toshiba said it was ending production of HD DVD hardware, allowing the Sony-back Blu-ray Disc to claim victory in the format war.
Toshiba yesterday said it would focus on products like Cell and solid-state storage in the post-HD DVD world.
Toshiba plans to use Cell in future HD TVs. This past January, at the Consumer Electronics Show, it demo'd an LCD TV equipped with Cell for image processing, including decoding multiple HD video streams for picture-in-picture displays.
COMMENTS
Anyone who thinks this purchase.....
relates to the Cell chip is kidding himself. After Toshiba makes an announcement that they are going to focus on their core business (NAND flash memory) you can bet that plant is going to be quickly retooled for the prouction of of high density memory.
Yeah, the Cells in the PS3 are nice (but I bet Sony has a sweetheart deal to get them from Toshiba at close to cost) but the real bread and butter is the future use of solid state storage.
as long as
my Toshiba laptop connects to my Sony TV there is no problem.
Yay Toshiba
Yay Sony
@AC
Huh? Why would anyone who knows anything about the PS3 be in any way surprised about Toshiba parts being inside the box? The Cell BE was a joint development with Toshiba and IBM, it's not like that's a secret only known to uber-geeks. Stop trying to create controversy where there is none. Toshiba and Sony have cooperated on products many times before and will again, just as they have competed with each other before and will again.
Once again...
It proves that the format war really doesn't matter to Toshiba.
HD is a minor battle, and as Chris Rogers pointed out above it only seems to be the media and fanboys that really felt it was particularly important.
Toshiba is too major an entity to be dented by something like the HD war with only a couple of million customers at best. This pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of DVD customers and the billions of devices using Toshiba's electronic components.
Oh how it must hurt Sony fanboys to know that their beloved PS3 is full of parts made by their arch enemy through the HD war - Toshiba ;)
Boldly Going ........
Now that is Good News and I would just like to ask Sony/Toshiba whether it is a Joint Venture into AI Created Reality Programming ..... a Venture which would Eclipse Hollywood/Third Party Media .... as in Show them the Way with Sublime Media Productions containing Multiple DirectXXXXions ...... for Third Party Media/Hollywood Reinforcement and Support Play?
Of course, if it is not, then by simply asking the question, must it be thought easily possible and therefore most probable with the information and technology available.
And it is an interesting Public BetaTest of the Internet to see just how effective Web published disclosures/questions can be. :-) .... and how selflessly supportive ITs Virtual Programmers [ie you] can also be.
