PS3 internals

The Marvell SATA chip you see on the PS3 board is PATA to SATA bridge, not a dedicated SATA controller. Code is 88SA8040. http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/sata/SerialATAII_88SM4140.pdf

This lends even more credibility to the I/O chip being the SCC.

 

Just found another teardown (sorry if old, couldn't find it on here) that may be of some interest, a lot of pics and some more chip close-ups, seems to suggest the PS1 chip is still on board which I didn't think would have been necessary.

Techrepublic - Cracking open the PS3

 

What makes you think that? As the PS1 chip has been replaced in the PS2, I find it incredibly improbably they'd have it in a PS3!

 

One of the pics is labelled as follows:-

System battery connector (white) and PlayStation 1 chip

No idea if they are correct or not though.

 

"CRX" is usually part of a Sony optical disc drive name, so that chip may have something to do with it, since it starts with "CRX" too.

 

There's a pic in there of "1GB of flash memory". Does the PS3 have that much flash? The Xbox360?

Never mind I guess it is 128 Mbyte. Still, didn't know about that.

 

It's probably 1Gigabit and contains the OS and stuff.

 

The PS3 mainboard contains 256 MByte flash memory in total, here is a nice component breakdown.

 

I'm wondering if it conains a built in backup (it can format an unformatted disc and such) or if that's all just for straightforward OS features. The PSP also has 2 flash banks, if I remember correctly.

 

Now that we have heard about "Home". Is it possible that the DDR that seems connected with the SCC is anouther memory space for Home to run without using XDR. Or is it more likely that this extra DDR is used for helping the SCC to emulate PS2 I/O hardware compatibility.

Also, is this DDR only on the developer SDK consoles or is it on all PS3 models.

 

from that pdf, there seems to be a 128Gb SRAM on the WIFI board - but I guess thats a typo

Hezz: I think you're a little confused, what are you talking about?

 

It's a typo in the Chipworks's PDF, if you look that part up (IS42S32400B) you'll see it is a 128 Mbits SDRAM chip.

 

Sorry guys, this is an idea got from some of the discussion a page or two back in the thread. There seemed to be a DDR chip in close proximity to the SB (southbridge ?). Or the SCC as Sony has been calling it.

I guess since Sony has stated that they want to built a media PC based on the PS3, the overkill of the SCC seems in order as it would allow more DDR2 to be installed which I would assume would be used by Linux or other software than games. Since game hardware specs would need to remain standardized.

This lead me to speculate that perhaps Sony had intended for a small DDR chip to function as a RAM space for Home. But most likely it is just used for some kind of PS2 hardware I/O emulation.