| bdbdbd said: Oh, i forgot: @Greenmedic: Anyway it doesn't matter whether Sony sold/hadn't sold its plant, it still was planning to sell the CPU (or atleast profit from it). The reason they got rid of the facility, was because of its bad financials. Since i don't know the details of their deal, can't really say how the money is shared and who had right to manufacture and sell it and to who and how much. |
But each firm that holds a stake in the patents for the CBE (Toshiba, Sony, IBM) manufactures its own products that utilize the chip. The only reason Sony was initially in the processor manufacturing business was to meet initial yield demands for PS3 production. I'm pretty sure it was never part of their strategy to become a chip vendor for Cell processors.
As of now, they have no hand in manufacturing the chips themselves. With current production output from other chip manufacturers with the facilities to produce Cell chips, it is actually more cost effective to buy the chips rather than produce them in house.
To my knowledge, there aren't any other companies currently buying these chips than Mercury Computer Systems (defense apps, medical imaging equipment, servers) and their partnership is with IBM. Companies like Leadtek have plans to use it for video and audio encoding cards, but that's in the future. No specifics on who's supplying the processors.
But from the information available, the only company that seems to be making deals to use Cell processors in any equipment not being manufactured in house, is IBM.
