Carl:
Sony has big announcement THUR that we should hear about late WED.
It seems that Sony PS II is not only ramping up production but also expanding the platform. Where does the 32 MB of local RDRAM fit in on PSII. Wouldn't an open platform allow other memory options besides 32 MB of RDRAM.
john
eetimes.com
Sony makes Playstation an open format
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(06/05/00, 5:12 p.m. EST)
TOKYO ? In a bid to dominate the videogame business and establish a beachhead in embedded systems, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. will sell on the merchant market the high-performance microprocessors and graphics chips used to drive its Playstation 2 game console, beginning next year. The company will also open up the platform's format, a move analysts say could dramatically swell the number of Playstation users.
Sony will back up its drive into the merchant market with a $1.2 billion investment to expand its semiconductor manufacturing plants. "With this investment, we will enter into a new business phase," said Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment. Increased production capabilities mean "we will be able to provide customers with powerful and flexible processor functions," he said.
"The gaming market is huge," said Nobuyuki Idei, president and chief executive officer of parent Sony Corp. "There are no other consumer electronics products that sell 2 million units in 80 days," as Playstation 2 did. But if the console "remained just a [Sony] platform, there would be limits to its market penetration. By opening the format, a new horizon will emerge."
By Kutaragi's accounting, licensing the Playstation format could boost the installed base for the new version of the console far beyond the 73 million users of the original Playstation. Moreover, expanding the Playstation base could help Sony progress toward its corporate goal of morphing from a hardware to a communications company. If the growing pool of Playstation 2 systems were all connected, it would create an instant network platform, Idei said.
Sony has not yet detailed how or when it will license the Playstation 2 format. However, the move is apparently a broad-based one.
Kutaragi said the company would be willing to ship its chips to competing game box developers. But much of the discussion here has focused on enabling embedded systems, ranging from Playstation 2-capable TVs to workstations and broadcast equipment that would use the Sony chips.
"In the future, Playstation 2 may be absorbed into TV sets and [the game console] may disappear," said Kutaragi.
Jon Peddie, the Tiburon, Calif.-based graphics-market watcher, applauded the move. "I think Sony is demonstrating an extraordinary amount of enlightenment by taking this first step toward opening its architecture," Peddie said. "In my opinion, this will double or even triple the number of Playstation 2 users."
Cloning for dollars
He pointed out that the basic business model for the game console market involves subsidizing the cost of the box and recouping that loss later by charging a royalty on the software. Allowing independent vendors to clone the boxes will save Sony the cost of manufacturing systems and selling them at less than cost, and the company will generate increased revenues from higher software sales. "I think this is a very clever move," said Peddie.
But Satoru Oyama, senior analyst at ABN Amro Securities (Japan) Ltd., said that "to make the Playstation 2 platform a de facto [standard], Sony should have got some manufacturers of set-top boxes and TVs as supporters before it made the chip sales announcement."
The Tokyo-based analyst does not believe the game machine can maintain its brisk sales for long, and that "Playstation 2 will peak in around 2002." In Oyama's view, Sony "wants to recoup a part of the R&D cost as well as aiming at de facto [standard] establishment by selling chips. The company itself should have started working on Playstation 3 to secure its advantage."
If Sony remains on schedule, Playstation 2 clones could hit the market at about the time when Sony's next big videogame competitor, Nintendo, rolls its Dolphin system and before Microsoft releases its X-Box console.
The new Playstation is built around a 128-bit processor, called the Emotion Engine, and a companion graphics device, called the Graphics Synthesizer, which has 4 Mbytes of embedded DRAM and memory bandwidth of 48 Gbytes/second. These chips, along with modified versions, are what will become available next year for third-party manufacturers.
Kutaragi disclosed a road map for the Emotion Engine last October. The first-generation CPU is at about the same level as a Pentium III, with some 10 million transistors. Emotion Engine 2, with 40 million transistors, is scheduled to be developed in 2002. A third version of the chip will feature 100 million transistors, with a launch date of 2005.
The Graphics Synthesizer can handle 720-pixel progressive-scan video as well as the 1,080-pixel interlaced format in real-time. But future TV sets may have to handle 4,000 x 2,000-pixel resolution. Kutaragi showed a prototype enhanced version of the IC with 32 Mbytes of embedded DRAM that he said was capable of delivering that resolution. Fabricated on an 0.18-micron process at Sony's Fab 1 in Nagasaki, this 21.3 x 21.7-mm chip integrates 287.35 million transistors ? 7.35 million for logic and 280 million for embedded DRAM.
"With this chip, manufacturers can build a graphic workstation that is far better than the current ones, or equipment for use in broadcast stations," Kutaragi said.
Embedding that much memory onto a chip is no easy feat. But Kutaragi said Sony had already cut its teeth in embedded DRAM on Playstation 2. "The development of the enhanced Graphics Synthesizer is a proof that the line is steadily taking off," he said.
Manufacturing is now running at yields of more than 50 percent, and is approaching 60 percent, according to an industry source.
Derivatives coming
Once the chips are out on the open market, the company intends to offer multiple kinds of Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer derivatives based on customer requests.
One possible application cited by Kutaragi is home servers that act as gateways for broadband networks and handle a large data stream, such as streaming video. "There will be enormous data traffic on the broadband network," he said. "Servers and routers should have an enormous processing capability. That's one possibility for Playstation 2 chips."
Another possible application might be to put the Graphics Synthesizer in a printer, to crank up its graphic-processing capability.
Sony Computer Entertainment intends to provide support and joint R&D programs to help customers adapt the two chips to fit their platforms. However, the company has no plans to license either one as an intellectual property core.
As of May 24, Sony Computer Entertainment had sold 2 million Playstation 2 systems in Japan, and the supply remains behind the demand here. Sony will begin overseas marketing on Oct. 26 in the United States, and shortly thereafter in Europe. The company plans to boost monthly production to 1.3 million units this autumn.
Currently, Sony Kokubu is producing the Graphics Synthesizer in a 0.25-micron process at its semiconductor fab in Kagoshima. Oita TS Semiconductor, a joint venture with Toshiba Corp., is fabricating the Emotion Engine, also at 0.25-micron line widths. By summer both devices will be moved to a 0.18-micron process.
Sony has already spent some $1.2 billion to bring up those production lines, and is making a second investment to enable the transition to a 0.15-micron process at three facilities.
About $215 million will go toward expanding the capacity of Fab 1 by 20 percent, to 12,000 eight-inch wafers per month. Roughly $630 million will go into building Fab 2 in Nagasaki, with a monthly capacity of 6,000 eight-inch wafers using an 0.18-micron process.
The remaining $322 million will be used at Oita. That should secure an additional monthly capacity of 5,000 eight-inch wafers. The Oita addition and Fab 2 are both expected to be in operation next April.
Sony plans to establish a total capacity of 18,000 eight-inch wafers per month for the Graphics Synthesizer and 15,000 for the Emotion Engine by June 2001.
The additional investments are "quite a strategic decision for Sony Group," said Kutaragi. |
