Best of: Latest Kutaragi Interview (HDD, blu-ray, RSX)

[Shifty Geezer]

I've heard future SPE's on a successful 1:8 fab will have one SPE deactivated on the hardware level, by a guy with a magnifying glass, steady hand, and small hammer and chisel.

 

[Npl]

@Npl: I think they'll have to hardware lock the 8th SPE throughout the life of the console, otherwise you get customers who purchased a PS3 with 7 SPE's with the possibility of suing to get theirs exchanged for an 8-SPE version, claiming 'defective' goods.

I could imagine you merely shedule APULets in the OS, it doesnt breaks anything if you have 8,12 or even a single SPU. (Means those 2*6SPU workstations will happily run the same software). No need to disable a working SPU if not needed.
Games will be verified by Sony anyways to just assume 7 working SPUs, so those wont be affected.

I've heard future SPE's on a successful 1:8 fab will have one SPE deactivated on the hardware level, by a guy with a magnifying glass, steady hand, and small hammer and chisel.

I dont have my humor at hand, do you honestly think you cant apply "Hardware-locks" ? :? [/quote]

 

[phat]

I'm going to assume that XeCPU will have the three cores on three dies, so the notion of shipping with a defective core disabled doesn't really apply.

could it be on three dies, wouldn't it need to be one die if they are going to share the cache

I think they're only sharing the L2 cache, which could be off-chip. Three cores and L2 on the same die would be very, very big...

 

[jvd]

They will simply disable the extra one and when ready they will just move to a isa with only 7 . Using the other one to of load tasks onto can cause the code to behave diffrently than on a 1x7 chip and thus screwing everything up . It can change timings and other things .