| kowenicki said: Ethomaz has been peddling the same story for months... he needs to stop with the yield thing. If he stops, I stop calling him out on it. Its a non-story based on nothing more than a rumour from a largely discredited gaf fanboy. |
The yield issue has been eplained in at least two threads here. Contraray of what you persistently deny, the yield issue was real late last year as anyone with some insight into the going-ons would know then. But since you insist on mincing words, I'll tell you the story AGAIN in simple terms so that even you might comprehend it at some point:
Late last year, MS shipped 15'000 wafers to three manufacturers for an initial production run of the SoC(s - it is not clear whether both SoCs were targeted or only one of them). Usually, an initial run comprises of around a few thousand chips, at most. Given the known die size of the APU, 15'000 wavers would result in over three million raw chips. That's over three million chips for maybe a need of a few hundred working chips. Do you see now why MS expected to have a yield problem? (as rumours have it, one foundry had ZERO working chips in the end).
And the key question: Does MS have yield issues now? While the XBox APU die size is larger than the PS4 die size (around 360 vs 320 mm^2), from the die shots that are floating around, it doesn't look like there is a fundamental difference in complexity or redundancy. So both Sony and MS can manufacture enough APUs/SoCs (in other words there are no yield issues as far as chips are concerned). The only difference is that manufacturing XBoxes is more expensive and likely takes more time per unit than PS4s. My guess is the difference is less than 20k units per week now, so in January there will be a difference of less than 3-400k in sold units (as both companies have roughly the same manufacturing capacities amd started manufacturing within 1-3 weeks of each other).
