i just read a coupla days ago that sony was spending $500 million...correct that make it $1 billion.
more and more i am forgetting about 2002-2003. this is going to happen
sooner than any of us dare believe. it looks like dave b has it right.
he said that the over 90% of the conversion to sdram happened in 24 months and predicted the same or better for rmbs. this 3d Q rollout of rdram is not going to be a trickle with small incremental increases. it is going to be like an avalanche, striking fast, furious, and overwhelming with great roaring noise starting swiftly and rapidly engulfing everything in its path. intel's little 60-90 day delay simply allows everyone a little breathing room. it gives a few more mfrs the opportunity to get it together and participate in the run. i visualize rdram exploding onto the scene in sep or earlier.
i like milehigh's metaphor for the share price...think hockeystick.
Sony puts $1 billion into Playstation ICs
Yoshiko Hara
Tokyo - In an otherwise economically depressed environment here, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. last week announced it will spend $1 billion building fabs to craft chips for the next-generation Playstation. The company also gave a first look at system-chip silicon inside the new videogame console that it plans to introduce next winter in Japan and in autumn 2000 in the United States and Europe.
The new Playstation architecture has "potential to grow beyond a mere game machine," said Nobuyuki Idei, president and co-chief executive of parent Sony Corp.
"Thus far, process evolution has been driven by memories," he said, "but Playstation 2 will be the start of a change, and it will be driven by systems-on-chip."
Playstation 2 will feature a so-called "Emotion Engine," a 128-bit CPU jointly developed by Toshiba Corp. and SCE; an embedded graphics chip called the Graphic Synthesizer developed by Sony, an I/O processor co-developed with LSI Logic Corp., and an SPU2 sound synthesizer, a second-generation version of the sound synthesizer now used in Playstations.
Rambus boost
The Emotion Engine has floating-point performance of 6.2 Gflops and a bus bandwidth of 3.2 Gbytes/second that's achieved through the use of Direct Rambus DRAM in two channels. Running at 300 MHz, SCE said, the CPU's floating-point performance is three times greater than the current 500-MHz Pentium III PC.
The Graphic Synthesizer, a 0.25-micron chip with 42.7 million transistors on a 16.8-mm die, integrates video memory and pixel logic on one chip to achieve a total memory bandwidth of 48 Gbytes/s. The parallel rendering processor operates at 150 MHz and has 16 parallel pixel engines and 4 Mbytes of multiport DRAM. It has a drawing capability of 50 million polygons/s with 48 quad, 24-bit color and Alpha-z data. Pixel fill rate is 2.4 Gpixels/s.
The new console will be backward-compatible with today's Playstation based on its use of an I/O processor, which uses the CPU of the current console as its core and is built by LSI Logic. The newer chip integrates current Playstation functions plus the IEEE 1394 and Universal Serial Bus interfaces. The console provides communications capabilities through a PC-card interface.
Joint fab
Sony and Toshiba will set up a joint fab for the Emotion Engine and Sony will build another for the graphics device. The Emotion Engine fab will consist of a new 8-inch wafer line in the existing clean room of Toshiba's Ohita fab. Sony's investment will be about $420 million.
The new line will fabricate the 10.5 million-transistor CPU on a 0.18-micron process, eventually shifting to 0.15 micron. Production will begin this fall, with a capacity of 10,000 wafers a month.
For the Graphics Synthesizer, Sony will establish a wholly owned subsidiary to run a fab that will be built in the parent company's Nagasaki works, at an investment of about $580 million. The fab will be installed with an 0.18-micron process line for embedded-DRAM fabrication. Sony Semiconductor Co. will run the fab, which should be operational in the spring of 2000, with a capacity of 10,000 wafers a month.
"For Playstation 2, we will integrate a large-capacity [4- Mbyte] DRAM with graphics-synthesizer architecture on one chip," said Ken Kutaragi, executive vice president and co-chief operating officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, and creator of the Playstation (see related story, page 125). "There is no infrastructure to produce such a chip in volume. So we decided to build a new fab in Nagasaki."
If Sony can achieve a high yield rate, said Michito Kimura, semiconductor analyst at IDC Japan Ltd., "they will be a real winner." If yields are not good, he said, the monthly 10,000 wafers Sony is targeting will not satisfy Playstation 2 demand.
Sony has already shipped more than 50 million units of its earlier-generation Playstation worldwide.
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