What are the chances PS3 will have two separate CELLs?

[one]

BTW, slightly offtopic, but how do you think will they implement the backward compatibility in PS3?

 

[_phil_]

Xbox 2 does have 512Mb of Ram DDR

and 2 CPUs instead of 3

 

[Panajev2001a]

Xbox 2 does have 512Mb of Ram DDR

and 2 CPUs instead of 3

We will see .

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

BTW, slightly offtopic, but how do you think will they implement the backward compatibility in PS3?

Software. It's just about the only possible way, assuming they want to have backward compatibility right out of the box. And as far as I'm concerned, in the console world, it's the only way it should ever be done. Hardware-level compatibility is inherently going to limit your design, and the whole point of game consoles is to have each and every one be a static platform unto itself which isn't limited by the pangs of legacy support. There's basically never going to be a single good reason to have backward compatibility at a hardware level in a console.

Now there are alternatives if backward compatibility is not right-out-of-the-box. e.g. a PS2-on-a-chip addon module that you'd buy separately. This is likely if Sony sees PS3 production costs to be way too high and decide to have an array of add-ons to help recoup the losses incurred by selling below cost.

Frankly, though, I don't expect them to be reducing the number of SPEs at all. Mainly because so much of the production has been 8-SPE units. Why bother developing whole new masks and validating a new design just to decrease die size a little bit. Now if it were a matter of producing 8-SPE units that have a certain SPE failure rate and up to x number of bad units were accepted in order to increase overall yield, that would be a different story. However, I don't think it will really make that big a difference.

 

[jvd]

They could put the gs +ee on90nm as the sound chip and do it that way . It would be very very small a year later at 65nm and its the only way to get 100% compatiblity