Coolio!

Cooler running, less electricity used, and lower prices.

All wins.

Not really, Sony used to produce the Cell themselves, but sold the facilities to Toshiba and set up a joint venture with them in which Toshiba owns 60% and Sony owns 40%. It's most probably cheaper for Sony to buy Cell from a company they own 40% of rather than one they own 0% of. It also guarantees them a stable supply of chips which may not be the case if they had to rely solely on a company they had no stake in. IBM leads development of Cell and has agreements to share this with Toshiba which is why there's a delay between when IBM reduce the die and when Toshiba reduce it. 

Link

Yeah. This looks positive for the Sony, the PS3 and the consumer.

i think they should release slim as soon as its down to 45. There is absolutely no downside to slimming it down. In fact it may even increase sales slightly.

Plus theres no rule saying you can only slim your console once. When the 32 or 22 comes out they could slim it further.

The 22nm process is a neutral-news/bad-news kind of announcement for the PS3 in my opinion ...

There is an element of it being good because it means that Sony should be able to reduce the cost of the PS3 faster than many would expect, and in 2010 they may finally have the PS3 down to the mass market price of $200; this ends up being fairly neutral because both Nintendo and Microsoft use the same manufacturing process with their CPUs as Sony uses with the Cell so they will also be able to take advantage of the cost reductions.

Where this becomes bad news is in what it means in terms of how the PS3 will compare to new hardware after its fifth birthday. The difference between the Gamecube/XBox and the PS3/XBox 360 is 2 manufacturing processes, the difference between the Dreamcast/PS2 and the PS3/XBox 360 is 3 manufacturing processes, and the difference between the N64 and the PS3/XBox 360 is 4 manufacturing processes ... The 22nm process is a 4 manufacturing process difference from the XBox 360/PS3 (and it is possible that by the end of 2012 we could see a 16nm process which would represent a 5 manufacturing process jump). Even if you factor in diminishing returns, when you're dealing with a 4 or 5 manufacturing process jump you should be able to produce a very noticeable improvement while keeping costs at a very reasonable level.

bkk2, yeah I forgot that Sony owns part of that plant. Still though they need to get on the ball with the chip shrinking (and blu ray) so that they can actually make money on each system sold. the ps2 and psp aren't going to be there forever to hide those losses.

I agree, I could definitely see them doing an intermediate step before the Slim - maybe in time for JP FF XIII launch.