DaveBaumann said:That particular option, being the Toshiba part I assume you are referencing, is likely another of the backup options. I’d say that a fully Cell route was the way they wanted to go, but their performance targets they had in mind for PS3 Cell processing are off and so they had to go with more traditional, dedicated, hardware for graphics processing – yes, its very easy to see that NVIDIA would be a far better option than the Toshiba route (that’s a total no-brainer IMO!) but neither the Toshiba or NVIDIA route where the way Sony wanted to go (at least, judging from the patents and the conversations I’ve had today).
I think perhaps there may be other explanations than performance being off the mark. Perhaps it ended up being cheaper to go with the nVdia graphics/sound option and a smaller scale cell design rather than using a larger scale cell design for everything. Given the recent PSP/DS price war, Sony may have realized that getting in a price war with Microsoft using a 100% cell design was going to leave them too far in the red.
I'm also very curious to see if the graphics chip may end up handling the sound processing too. A lot of the same kinds of operations come into play for 3D positional sound. That might justify the $5 per chip.
Nite_Hawk