Sony losing about $40 on each PS3

[Squilliam]

makingmusic476 said:

Stefan.De.Machtige said:

talkingparrot said:
Despite the negative spin that will obviously be generated by the OP - this is actually good news. It shows Sony is very close to cutting even. This Fall when the 45 nm gets installed, with a smaller mother board, an external power supply, and a overall smaller chasis - you can rack that up to a savings of almost 100 bucks- Perfect for a slim line :D.

If they actually save a 100$. And that's a big if. The 45 nm switch won't get them that much. Why do you think they would pass that on to the consumer? Sony needs all the profits it can muster. It's operating more or less in survivalmode.

 

 

If they go slimline, it will lead to a decent amount of cost saving.  Dropping to 45nm Cell and RSX leads to more dies per ceramic wafer, which leads to far less ceramic used.  Plus, because the new chips use less power and produce less heat, this leads to smaller power supplies, heatsinks, and fans, which leads to a smaller motherboard overall, which means they'll be using less materials on the motherboard in addition to less materials on these other parts.  If they can manage to cram all that into a much smaller case, that'll be yet another area where they can save money on plastics.

Dropping to 45nm Cell+RSX should save them more money than any hardware reduction yet, if they can manage to create a slim ps3.

Except there are a few problems with your posts.

If they go to 45nm much of the savings will be kept by IBM as they don't hold many of the patents and they sold the manufacturing facilities for the Cell. Also they don't use ceramic for chips, they use purified silicon.

As for a shrink, I don't think we'll see the PS3 slim, I think the PS3 was originally intended to be produced on the 65nm process and because they had to use the 90nm the extra heat caused them to need a new chassi design 45nm isn't far enough from the original design specifications. I suspect if they do a change, it will be to the original design specifications and probably make the chassi about the same size as the Xbox 360. Also smaller PSUs, heatsinks etc do not make for a smaller motherboard, but the main thing is actually the number of PCB layers they need to use rather than the physical size so switching to doubled up XD ram would be more of a saving here.

Lastly, much of their cost probably comes from licencing fees. They have to pay for the use of the RSX (Nvidia financial report claimed lower revenue due to fewer than expected PS3 sales) They have to pay $15 per player for Blu Ray, probably $5 or so for DVD and they have to pay for the memory controller and extra for the XD ram itself on top of paying another company for the Cell.