New PS3 board shown at CES

Rangers said:
PS3slim (or X360 slim) will have to deal with the added encumberment of the enclosed HDD though. Wont be so easy this time around as with PS2.
The question is what people consider "Slim" form factor.
The original "Fat"-PS2 is less then half the size of 360/PS3 to begin with, and it Includes a 3.5" HDD Bay which is bigger then 360&PS3 HDDs combined.
Or looking at it another way, PS2 Slim with a 2.5"drive bolted on would not even be 1/3rd the size of PS2 "Fat". Hell the latest Slim model with integrated PS could house at least a 1.8" HDD if you moved the PS back out.

As long as they can get the rest of the hw to fit in a smaller case without overheating(which has yet to be proven viable), HDD could always be attached with minimum change to form factor as some sort of 'external' slot like 360 does now.
 
The new board is roughly 2/3rd of the original boards size in surface area from my measurements.

The important part of getting PS3 that is significantly smaller than what we have know is getting the amount of dissipated heat to go down. Almost half the volume and most of the weight of the current build is the cooling system. They've already made pretty big improvements with the 40GB model as far as power consumption (135W down from 200W).

Also the Bluray drive itself is fairly big. It's basically full PC form factor size minus a little bit. I'm sure by now major component reductions on the drive itself could result in a much simpler drive unit. Sometime more like a laptop size optical drive is no doubt the goal. This will probably also be key to getting a PS Slim.

Combining RSX and Cell is probably not going to happen for a long time. But I seriously don't think Sony will wait for that to happen before doing a relaunch of the console in a new form factor. I don't think PS2 is going to be the model with just one major iteration per generation. It will likely be modeled after the PSP which has had already 3 major hardware relaunches from the consumers perspective.

I'm pretty optimistic that they will be able to pull off a PS3 that is almost half the size of the current model in this year.
I've read that CELL is designed for easely replacing SPE with any other accelearator like GPU. I'm sure their are ready with it and only waiting for process shrink for both CELL and RSX to 32nm.
 
Sony sold 74.34 millions PS1 before PSone
Sony sold 73.90 millions PS2 before PStwo

and even in their first versions, this consoles has low power consumption CPU/GPU with more fast process evolution and no HDD
maybe we will have a new PS3 design but not really a slim version

Where are these stats from?
 
The question is what people consider "Slim" form factor.
Yes, I think there's good scope for an interrim shrink from Massive to Normal size. If the heatsink can be reduced that much, that was the bulk of the volume in the PS3 making for a lot of empty space. But then what would the costs of the console shrink be with a new design and new production lines? That historically there's only ever been one shrink per platform points to a threshold level that discourages too much variation.
 
PS3 Slim is far from now. Unless Cell and RSX are integrated in one chip like EEGS on PS2.

Maybe some little surprise for Slim model use 512MB XDR rather than 256MB XDR.
Like PSP slim applied.
 
Theres no a point to doing this, the only thing it would achieve is raising the production cost of the PS3.

Yes. The only point would be if the system would be relaunched so that Linux gets RSX enabled or if it is useful somehow for the browser or media features (which is similar to PSP). And of course if in fact 512 chips end up being cheaper because noone else wants 256 chips ... but I can't see any of these aspects as being currently relevant.
 
Proof to what? The RAM increase in the PSP was about battery life more than anything else. In the PS3 since you aren't worried about reducing optical reads to save electricity then all doubling the XDR does is increase the build cost.
 
Now owning a Ps3, one can tell it's expensive. Its large, it's heavy, it's glossy, it has fancy power buttons. it feels like a top end piece of electronics. While this is nice, it causes one to think, "no wonder they cant get the price down". It's a double edge sword I suppose.
 
Is their any database of serial numbers or whatever to tell what revision of the MB of the PS3 one has? Or are their specific models that we know have the revised chipsets?
 
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