| shams said: I haven't followed this thread to date - and have no time or intention to do so. But two things caught my eye: 1/ I was pretty sure SPU 8 was *completely* disabled as part of the manufacturing process - to keep die sizes down, and the unit itself more stable (and less power drawing). I find it hard to believe that its there in some form of redundancy state. 2/ Has there been ANY mention of the system resources that each OS gobbles up? From what I understand the PS3 reserves at LEAST one of the SPUs - plus an arbitrary amount of general CPU cycles for the OS. And depending what is running, up to 60-100MB of system RAM? (the 360 uses a fixed amount of 32MB of RAM, and minimal cycles while a game is running?)
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1) SPE 8 is completely disabled, but it is not removed from the die. When you make a wafer of chips, there are always defects. Instead of simply discarding all chips that aren't 100% functional, they take the ones that have 7 out of the 8 SPEs working and disable the bad one. That means they can produce more viable chips per wafer, which brings costs down. It doesn't have any effect on the die size, and only a very minimal effect on the power draw. It's possible that some, or even many, of the chips in PS3s would work fine if you could somehow enable the 8th SPE, but it's also certain that many of them would not work. It's there on the die, but doesn't add redundancy or stability.
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