*Spin off* Bill of Materials and Cost/Price Reductions of Current Consoles

Why? If something costs $400 at the factory gate, you take a hit selling it at $400 at retail; plus, to speak about "compete with MS" you need to know something about MS' production cost, no matter what the cost to Sony is.

 

That doesn't matter...production is production. They all start small at 1st to minimize risk and then ramp when they're confident of yields, pretty much SOP everywhere you go.

That press release is for when they opened their 1st 45nm only fab, but they'd been ramping production in 3 other fabs since June or so in 2007 that were converted to 45nm beforehand, Fab 11X in New Mexico, D1D in Oregon, and Fab 28 in Israel.

Yup, and the others close up shop because they won't get enough money, which drives the price up again, etc. Companies have tried the games you're talking about, trying to play the manufacturers off each other but they all failed in the end, mainly because the parts were niche. In the semiconductor world you almost always need stupefying amounts of volume to make things cheaply, there is just no getting around that.

Cuz' the memory producers have never colluded before to fix prices right? lol

If they only produced XDR I think you'd have an argument.

 

I was discussing earliest possible times, if they want to clear out older stock, etc. then of course they can do whatever they want. Usually though when there is a die shrink they try to get it out ASAP because it saves them money.

Sony doesn't control the fabs and they can't make them go any faster. Why is the long lead time so shocking? Why do you think AMD is taking so long to do a simple revision? Unless you're talking about boutique rocket runs for tests 6 months is about how long it takes to the fab the chips, test them, package them (not box package, but MCM, FCPGA, etc.), and get them in a product.

I'm not saying its a showstopper... I'm saying its expensive vs. GDDR3 and will continue to be so for a long time, and that plus the cost of some other PS3 specific components makes a pricewar with MS a losing proposition. Also, bear in mind the PS2's volume...

 

So why would Sony keep components in stock for 6 months then?

I was talking about a new revision of the console, which is needed when you change a major component like the RSX. I honestly don´t get your comparison to AMD revision cycles.

We know that RSX should have gone into mass-production in December of last year, that means that revision of the RSX was completed, then we need a new revision of the motherboard, that design was of course done in parallel with final prototypes of the RSX. They don´t start that design process after the RSX has gone into mass-production, in fact they can´t because they need to test the RSX in a prototype close to the final product before they go into mass-production. The mass-production of the motherboards may very well go into mass-production in parallel with the new RSX.

The new motherboard and the new RSX may very well hit the assembly lines just some months after mass-production perhaps we are talking weeks, it all depends how good their logistics are. They have third party manufactoring lines already assigned for motherboard production, if they already have done production tests for the new motherboard prototype, they can assign a production line to the new motherboard design very quickly, this I know from practical experince in my work.

Your comparison to AMD is very strange.

Well the interesting question is how much more expensive.

As we don´t have any price of 512 Mbit GDDR3 or XDR components, we kan take a look at DDR2 400 MHz, which retail between $2.18 and $2.65 according to link.
Of course GDDR3 and XDR are more expensive perhaps the double, but it gives an idea what kind of money we are talking about. Let say there is a $1 difference between GDDR3 and XDR, that wouldn´t make a difference more than $4 in total for the XDR in the PS3 today. Maybe it s more today, we don´t know, but going forward we can be sure that the difference will become less as volumes go up and the GDDR3 and XDR go through process shrinks.

 

You'd have to ask them, they're probably the only ones who know the details of their contracts and finances well enough to answer. Only thing that makes sense to me is that the manufacturer's wouldn't deal with them unless they agreed to buy a certain minimum amount of components to make it worth their while, but thats just a WAG.

What makes you think that they'll be faster than Intel, AMD, IBM, or TSMC at producing a die shrink/revision? They can only go so fast you know... What leads you to believe they'd have the shrink done and shipping in PS3's in 3 months? Can you show me someone doing something similar?

Why? Cuz' AMD does x86 CPU's and were talking about the RSX? There are going to be some differences, but they are made in a similar fashion aren't they?

Of course, but what I doubt is that XDR will become as cheap or cheaper than GDDR3. Could you give me any reason why you think that wouldn't be so or why it isn't a big deal?

 

Don't confuse sample production with volume production.
Why do you pull an older article about new fabs being built? I don't know how you reached the conclusion that they had been mass manufacturing it at fabs that would open in 2008.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20071025corp.htm

Again, 65nm RSX entered volume production in Dec 2007.
http://it.nikkei.co.jp/business/news/index.aspx?n=AS1D220A8 22112007
(machine translation)

I doubt XDR manufacturers abandon a high-volume deal for which they bought expensive license from Rambus themselves.

 

The info all seems correct to me...

AFAIK samples never get sold, they're for testing purposes only during process development, they never even leave the labs...

Also from the Intel newspress you linked:

Aaaand we've gotten down to semantics...

;(

 

?
Even the article you quoted, dated 27th February 2007, says
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/106141/intel-readies-new-mexico-fab-for-45nm-chip-production.html

So Fab 11X was not at all ready in 2007. As for Fab 28 as of 27th February 2007,

while the press release from Intel on Oct. 25, 2007 says Fab 28 will open in 2008, which shows it's behind the initial schedule.

The 45nm production in Jan 2007 at D1D was production of prototype 45nm processors.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070128comp.htm

Not really. It's clearly your reading comprehension.

 

I would like to interject... Is it fair to use Intel as a point of comparison for ramping up production? Intel is a bit of a master of fabrication.

 

RSX is fabbed at a Toshiba fab that Sony will transfer in this Spring.

 

Ewps, screwed that one up sorry. It was either sleep or post on B3D, guess which thought won out?

Didn't see anything about D1D doing only prototypes there though...

There are also Intel 45nm chips floating around that were made in Aug. if I read those batch numbers correctly, where would you believed those came from?

 

Its kind've like going through best case scenarios then right?

 

Eh, where does it say it's manufactured in August? It only says the package date is Dec 2007.

EDIT: If you mean Q740A493T and the 40th week for Aug 26th-31st it's still 3 months lag, not 6 months.

 

Not so sure about the bolded part... there's something more to it, as shown by the 360 shortages in the US this holiday season (see any of the "what's happening at retail" threads at NeoGAF).

Personally, I expect for $199 for the Arcade, just for bragging rights ("GTA is the same on the $200 and on the $400 console"), but a more modest drop ($50, as you say) on the Pro that most people buy.

 

To be fair Intel CPUs need no assembly so PS3 will take longer than 1 month to reach each market, but it can be a counterexample to your 6-months average time to market that I have no idea where you pulled out from.

 

So where did you get your 6 months figure from, I am totally lost in your arguing.

Producing a shrink/revision is one thing, I was discussing the time from volume production of a component start to when there is a product using that component ready to sell.

In this case the product is a game console that has been launched and has an established market presence and there are working production lines using older components, i.e. they don´t need to build supply to support a major launch or produce the components well a head of launch to minimize risk of production failure causing a component bottle neck. For comparison look at blu ray diode which caused the delay of the PS3 in Europe.

I am lost here, are you talking about a component that has gone into mass-production or component that is going through the process of redesign for a process shrink? We don´t know when they started the design of the 65 nm RSX they may have been working on it for more than two years, what do I know. However, there was an article stating the RSX would go into mass production in December and you claim they need 6 more months after that to put it in a PS3. You have so far not presented any reasonable logic to back that up.

I did in my previous post, but for some reason you cut that part away in your response. BTW perhaps you could explain why you don´t think the cost of EDRAM of Xenos will be a big deal? I expect your argument to be similar.

 

Sorry all i dont read all posts.

Why sony only october/november launched ps3 40GB with cell 65nm if IBM moved cell production since march/2007?

http://www.generationstarwars.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

With RSX 65nm have same problens or "timing" to improve next "40GB" console?

(they have problems with 65nm process or improve yields rate until "safe production",scale etc ?)

 

Try this explaination: Sony expected more PS3 sales than they initially achieved, they had about 5 million units shipped from factory in March but didn´t sell 5 million units until late summer, leading to excess supply of PS3s using the 90 nm Cell which they prefered to clear as much of as possible before moving to the 65 nm version and afterwards they kept it in the more expensive models which are currently step by step being discontinued in the PAL-countries and Japan.

The 40 GB model using the 65 nm Cell was in production already in June 2007, those assembly lines provided the 40 GB units that were launched in large numbers in Japan, PAL and US in the fall.

If they plan to start using the 65 nm RSX without introducing a new model with larger/smaller HDD or whatever, i.e. just a new revision of an existing model, then there is no need to build up a large stock before they start selling the model on the market, they just ramp up the production of the new model at the speed they find adequate and let it just blend in among the existing stock on the market. Just like MS didn´t make a big deal of the hdmi equipped Premium-model that was slowly introduced on the market.